Description:
Charlotte Temple is one of the great early bestsellers of American literary history: a sentimental novel of innocence, seduction, betrayal, exile, and ruin. Young Charlotte is persuaded to leave England with the British officer Montraville, believing herself loved and protected. Instead, she is carried across the Atlantic into isolation, abandonment, poverty, and disgrace, while the promises made to her collapse under ambition, weakness, and social indifference.
First published in London in 1791 as Charlotte, A Tale of Truth and published in America in 1794, Susanna Haswell Rowson's novel became a cultural phenomenon. Its story of a young woman destroyed by misplaced trust spoke powerfully to early American readers and helped make the seduction novel one of the defining forms of the period. More than a moral warning, Charlotte Temple exposes the vulnerability of women in a world where reputation, family authority, money, and male conduct could determine a woman's entire fate.
Readers interested in early American fiction, women writers, sentimental novels, seduction narratives, and the history of popular reading will find Charlotte Temple essential. It is a landmark in the development of American literary culture: a book once read with extraordinary intensity, repeatedly reprinted, and remembered as one of the first great publishing successes of the new republic.
Brief description: Susanna Haswell Rowson was a British-American novelist, poet, playwright, actress, educator, and advocate of women's education. Born in Portsmouth, England, in 1762, she spent part of her childhood in Massachusetts before the American Revolution forced her family back to Britain. Her varied life as writer, performer, teacher, and school founder gave her a deep interest in the moral, social, and educational pressures placed on women, especially young women vulnerable to persuasion, poverty, and reputation.Rowson's best-known work, Charlotte Temple, became one of the most popular novels of the early American republic and remained in print through many editions. Its success made her one of the most important early women writers in American literary history, while its themes of seduction, abandonment, female vulnerability, and social judgment placed it at the center of the sentimental and cautionary fiction of its age. Rowson's broader career also included plays, poetry, educational writing, religious writing, and work in geography, making her a notable figure in the cultural and literary life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.