Description
The understated American epistolary tale of the cajolery and distress of a fiery young lady. Taken from the life account of Elizabeth Whitman, whose desolate loss in giving birth in a Connecticut inn flickered pervasive confab and disgrace, the story had several editions and incalculable printings for many years after its first print in 1797. The passion of Eliza Wharton was seen in publication not some years following the presumed dealings it so truly tries to document. Drafted as it was by one greatly knowledgeable for the years, the famous wife of a famous minister, related in no outlying degree, by matrimony, with the family of the female protagonist, and one who by the vocation and status of her husband was, as by inevitability, taken into the domain of concrete interaction with the leading characters of the tale. Hannah Webster Foster was a writer. Herepistolary novel, The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton, was printed namelessly in 1797. Though it was a hit in the 1790s, it was not until 1866 that the real novelists name was seen on the title leaf. In 1798, she printed The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils, an annotation on female education in the USA. She was from Salisbury, Massachusetts, to a rich tradesman, it is expected that Hannah enrolled in an academy for women like the one she portrayed in The Boarding School; indeed, the literary insinuations and historical details covered in her novel specify an excellent education. In the 1770s, she started drafting political essays for Boston periodicals, and in 1785, she got married to Rev. John Foster. Both lived in Brighton, Massachusetts, where John Foster became a minister at First Church. They had six children, then she created her two novels and thereafter went back to writing in periodicals.