One of the earliest women novelists in the new republic, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood is generally considered the first American woman writer of Gothic fiction. Also recognized as the first woman writer of Maine, she has been praised for her depiction of local scenes of her native state. Her reputation as an American reworker of Anne Radcliffe's Gothic fiction is somewhat mistaken because it is based only on her first novel, Julia and the Illuminated Baron (1800). Although she also used some Gothic motifs in her later novels, as Henri Petter has shown, the novels vary in style. Early critics described Wood as one of a group of women novelists who imitated the work of Susanna Rowson, an American popularizer of the Richardsonian style. In the late twentieth century, critics have reevaluated Wood's fiction.

To understand Sally Wood's history and her work, it is necessary to examine her...