BIOGRAPHY

Foster, Edward Halsey. Catharine Maria Sedgwick. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974, 171 p.

A full-length biography of Sedgwick.

CRITICISM

Bauermeister, Erica R. “The Lamplighter, The Wide, Wide, World, and Hope Leslie: Reconsidering the Recipes for Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels.” In Legacy 8, No. 1 (Spring 1991): 17-28.

A comparative study of three novels written by prominent nineteenth-century women writers, commenting on their standing as autonomous works of literature.

Castiglia, Christopher. “In Praise of Extra-Vagrant Women: Hope Leslie and the Captivity Romance.” In Legacy 6, No. 2 (Fall 1989): 3-16.

An analysis of Hope Leslie as a frontier romance that subverts racial and gender stereotypes.

Gossett, Suzanne and Barbara Ann Bardes. “Women and Political Power in the Republic: Two Early American Novels.” In Legacy 2, No. 2 (Fall 1985): 13-30.

An analysis and comparison of Hope Leslie and Sarah Josepha Hale's Northwood as fictive expressions of the contemporary political culture.

Gould, Philip. “Catharine Sedgwick's ‘Recital’ of the Pequot War.” In American Literature 66, No. 4 (December 1994): 641-62.

Examines Sedgwick's revisionary history of the Pequot War in Hope Leslie and discusses the significance of its “anti-patriarchalism.”

Holly, Carol. “Nineteenth-Century Autobiographies of Affiliation: The Case of Catharine Sedgwick and Lucy Larcom.” In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Paul John Eakin, pp. 216-34. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

A discussion of nineteenth-century women's autobiographies as texts of affiliation that present the autobiographical act as an intimate, interactive, and female event.

Karafilis, Maria. “Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie: The Crisis between Ethical Political Action and U.S. Literary Nationalism in the New Republic.” In American Transcendental Quarterly 12, No. 4 (December 1998): 327-44.

Proposes that a conflict exists in Hope Leslie between Sedgwick's desire for an alternative model of governance and her desire to foster a domestic national literature.

Nelson, Dana. “Sympathy as Strategy in Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, pp. 191-202. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Contends that the sympathetic frame of reference employed by Sedgwick and other female authors in their frontier romances fostered a more positive cultural vision by attempting to promote similarities between races and cultures.

Ross, Cheri Louise. “(Re)Writing the Frontier Romance: Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.” In College Language Association Journal 39, No. 3 (March 1996): 320-40.

Examination of Hope Leslie as a frontier romance that transforms the genre by giving it a feminist, non-racist nature.

Zagarell, Sandra A. “Expanding ‘America’: Lydia Sigourney's Sketch of Connecticut and Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.” In Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 6, No. 2 (Fall 1987): 225-45.

Discussion of Sedgwick and Sigourney's works as examples of women's writing that offers an expanded view of America as a nation grounded in inclusiveness and a sense of community.

Additional coverage of Sedgwick's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 1, 74, and 183.