SOURCE: Donovan, Josephine. “Toward the Local Colorists: Early American Women's Traditions.” In New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition, pp. 25-37. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983.

In the following essay, Donovan discusses the origins of women's literary realism in America and the place of the women local colorists within that tradition.

Three novels which are representative of early and divergent traditions in American women's literature are Susanna Rowson's Charlotte, A Tale of Truth (first published in this country in 1794, and better known as Charlotte Temple); Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagent Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (1801); and Catharine Sedgwick's A New-England Tale; Or, Sketches of New-England Character and Manners (1822).

Charlotte Temple is an archetypal example of what Nancy K. Miller has labeled the “dysphoric heroine's text.” It recounts the seduction and abandonment of a young innocent, who eventually gives illegitimate birth and dies...