Hannah Webster Foster | Biography

Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette is probably the finest of the sentimental novels of the early national period. Psychologically astute, wellplotted, and carefully written, the novel portrays sensitively the life and death of Elizabeth Whitman, an accomplished poet of the day. In its depiction of an intelligent and strong-willed heroine, the novel transcends many of the conventions of its time and place.

Born in Salisbury, Massachusetts, the daughter of Grant Webster, a Boston merchant, and Hannah Wainwright Webster, Hannah Webster was sent to boarding school in 1762 after her mother died. Although virtually nothing is known of her childhood and adolescence, comments in The Boarding School suggest that she found her own schooling to be exemplary. In 1785 she married the Reverend John Foster, a Dartmouth College graduate who went on to serve as pastor of the First Church in Brighton, Massachusetts. The couple had six children.

The Coquette was published anonymously in 1797 after she had become the mother of one child. The book was an immediate success, one of only two American novels (the other was Susanna Rowson's Charlotte. A Tale of Truth, 1791) to be a "bestseller" (purchased by more than one percent of the population) in the decade before 1800. Like virtually all novels of the day, The Coquette claimed to be "Founded on Fact." The claim was accurate. The novel portrayed sympathetically the recent and much-publicized account of Elizabeth Whitman's elopement and her death while giving birth to an illegitimate child. Although there were numerous speculations about who the father of the child might be, evidence strongly suggests that Pierrepont Edwards was the prototype for Sanford, the rather callow young seducer in the novel. Variously described as "a Chesterfieldian" and a "second Lovelace," Sanford embodies perfectly the traits of the womanizing woman-hater. Not until the final pages of the book, after he has lost wife, family, lover, and fortune, does he see himself for the dubious character he has always been.

Nor does Eliza, for all her obvious intelligence, recognize the depths of his disregard. She immediately perceives that he is flamboyant and perhaps a little shallow, but Foster makes the seducer seem more appealing by contrasting him to a second male character, the Reverend Boyer, who also falls short of Eliza's ideals. Pompous and pedantic, Boyer represents a life of stultifying convention.

The introduction of two opposite male characters adds a new wrinkle to the Richardsonian novel of sentiment which is the ostensible model for The Coquette. When the heroine has only one suitor to contend with, her choice becomes the rather simple one of whether she will or will not succumb to his sexual desires. The opposition, then, is between the salacious male character and the virtuous female. But once the female character must choose between men, the reader is forced to weigh carefully the relative merits of representative male characters. To further complicate the moral issues involved here, Foster portrays each male character as less than perfect. Eliza's choices are realistic, and she essentially wants neither. Considering her unsatisfactory alternatives, Eliza at one point laments, "What a pity that the graces and virtues are not oftener united."

Nor is Eliza simply too fussy. Early on she goes to spend time with her friends, the Richmans. Their contented, egalitarian marriage is the ideal after which Eliza aspires. But clearly neither Boyer nor Sanford is a General Richman. Thus, Eliza dallies, choosing neither, until both ultimately reject her. Dejected by finding herself a spinster at the age of thirty-seven, she now has a relationship with Sanford, who has married another woman solely for her fortune. Eliza's act, carefully motivated within the plot, is more an act of calculated self-destruction than coquetry. Her death in childbirth, alone and friendless at a wayside inn, attests to the limitations of her suitors more than to her own lapse of morality.

The Coquette is a moving book, even to the modern reader who finds it easy to dismiss sentimental fiction as inferior art. Numerous modern critics, for example, have noted that Eliza is not a fainting, stereotypical sentimental heroine but a rebel, trying to define herself against the limitations imposed on late-eighteenth-century women. The readers of the time appreciated the novel too. It was reprinted nearly a dozen times by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. H. Horatius Nichols dramatized the novel in 1802 as The New England Coquette. The book remained in print until well into the twentieth century and is, in fact, in print today.

Foster's second novel, The Boarding School (1798), was never reprinted nor did it deserve to be. It is didactic and prosaic, lacking in art and ingenuity. However, even in this inferior work Foster proves an important spokeswoman for changing social values. The Boarding School, like numerous novels of the day, advocates better female education. More striking, it castigates the double sexual standard, insisting that a girl once seduced is not necessarily a "bad" woman and should not be ostracized by her society. The novel also insists that men be held much more accountable for their sexual behavior and transgressions and be made to share equally the burden of their illicit actions.

Foster did not go on to write other novels, but she did encourage two of her daughters, Eliza Lanesford Cushing and Harriet Vaughan Cheney, to enter literary careers. Foster lived with these daughters in Montreal until her death at the age of eighty-one.