The Coquette (Early American Women Writers)
Editorial Reviews
From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister
Of the many cautionary novels written at the end of the eighteenth century which describe the seduction and betrayal of a beautiful young woman, The Coquette is one of the most interesting for twentieth-century readers. Eliza Wharton is based on an actual person, and her story is told through a series of letters which gives the book stylistic complexity. But it is the character of Eliza Wharton herself that distinguishes this book. Eliza is no ingenuous sixteen-year-old; she is past adolescence, has opinions, and wants more from her life than the narrow path that has been allotted to her. She agrees to an engagement she does not want because "both nature and education had instilled into my mind an implicit obedience to the will and desires of my parents," but also because "I saw, from our first acquaintance, his declining health; and expected, that the event should prove as it has." After her fiance's death, she rejects a second potential husband because he bores her, and becomes caught up in the flattery of the dashing Major Sanford as much for the sense of adventure as in hopes of matrimony. Her death was the required literary ending of her time, but Eliza Wharton's dynamic, frustrated personality and the questions she raises about women's place in society make this both a cautionary tale and a critique of the world that made them necessary. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.
Book Description
The Coquette tells the much-publicized story of the seduction and death of Elizabeth Whitman, a poet from Hartford, Connecticut. Written as a series of letters - between the heroine and her friends and lovers - it describes her long, tortuous courtship by two men, neither of whom perfectly
suits her. Eliza Wharton (as Whitman is called in the novel) wavers between Major Sanford, a charming but insincere man, and the Reverend Boyer, a bore who wants to marry her. When, in her mid-30s, Wharton finds herself suddenly abandoned when both men marry other women, she willfully enters into
an adulterous relationship with Sanford and becomes pregnant. Alone and dejected, she dies in childbirth at a roadside inn. Eliza Wharton, whose real-life counterpart was distantly related to Hannah Foster's husband, was one of the first women in American fiction to emerge as a real person facing
a dilemma in her life. In her Introduction, Davidson discusses the parallels between Elizabeth Whitman and the fictional Eliza Wharton. She shows the limitations placed on women in the 18th century and the attempts of one woman to rebel against those limitations.
The Coquette (Early American Women Writers),Hannah W. Foster,Cathy N. Davidson,Oxford University Press, USA,0195042395,American - General,American Novel And Short Story,Classics,Fiction,Fiction - General,Literature: Classics,Women's Studies - General,16th to 18th century fiction,English,Fiction / Classics,Literature/English | American Literature | Colonial & 18th C,Novels, other prose & writers: 16th to 18th centuries,USA
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