A popular as well as critically acclaimed writer in her own time, Sedgwick is best remembered for her novels depicting colonial and early-nineteenth-century New England life. Sedgwick's contemporaries praised her use of distinctly American characters, history, morals, values, and ideals. She was also noted for her realistic descriptions of domestic detail and regional culture. Sedgwick's first novel, A New-England Tale, was published in 1822, and she is numbered among a group of nineteenth-century writers who helped found a uniquely American body of literature. Although neglected by scholars and critics for many years, Sedgwick's work was rediscovered in the 1970s, and since then most attention has been focused on Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in Massachusetts (1827), a historical novel that treats Puritan attitudes towards religion, women's role in the new American republic, and the relationship between whites and Native Americans. Feminist scholars have analyzed Sedgwick's subversion of the traditional frontier...