Description:
In the American colonies, a German immigrant founds a secretive religious sect before dying mysteriously. His children, Clara and Theodore Wieland, continue to reside on his property, and, despite the tragedy of their father's death, attempt to lead normal, prosperous lives. When they begin to hear voices, and when a strange man named Carwin appears, the ghosts of the past invade the idyllic world they have managed to make for themselves. Wieland weaves a tale of horror that continues to surprise over two hundred years after its publication.
Brief description:
Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) was an American novelist and historian. Born to a family of Quakers in Philadelphia, Brown studied as a lawyer before embarking on a literary career. Alongside his work as a successful author of novels, short stories, essays, and poetry, Brown was a well-regarded editor and public intellectual. He was heavily influenced by British radicals of the French Revolutionary period, including Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and became an important figure both in the developing American literary scene and for such writers as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. His style exhibits a profound understanding of Gothic fiction and radical democratic politics, and his works incorporate elements of sentimental fiction, the captivity narrative, and epistolary form in their composition. Although he was far from the only writer working in early America, his critical acclaim and popular success certainly make him one of the most important. Brown's brief but productive career earned the admiration of Walter Scott, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, all of whom he inspired and influenced.