William Hill Brown (1765–1793)

The dangers of sexual sin and improper conduct are the focus of the two early American novels contained in this volume. In The Power of Sympathy(1789), which, incidentally, is often mentioned as the first novel written by an American and published in the United States, the consequences of a long-ago seduction threaten the happiness of a man's daughter and son. The title character in The Coquette (1797) pays a steep price for listening to the honeyed words of a incorrigible rake. Like Charlotte Temple (1791), another novel of the same vintage, these two epistolary novels are wordy, didactic, and filled with crying, fainting, and fits of low spirits. Still, they are interesting for the light they shed on late eighteenth century mores.… (more)