In traditional courtship stories, hero and heroine meet, fall in love, overcome misunderstandings or other obstacles, and, just as the curtain falls, marry each other. A courtship plot is predictable, but that does not mean it has no deeper significance. Quite the contrary: courtship stories are windows through which we can examine key values of a society and discover ways that those values are changing or being challenged. On the surface, courtship is intimately personal, but each story of individual desire and fulfillment is enacted within a particular social context, and every society is deeply invested in who marries whom. In nineteenth-century American literature, novels with courtship plots come most often from the established societies of the South and the Northeast. Courtship is defined and practiced by the privileged classes within a given society, and it is those groups that are most deeply concerned with what happens to...