Charlotte Temple: A Classic Early American Bestseller - Paperback

by Susanna Haswell Rowson (Author)

Charlotte Temple is one of the great early bestsellers of American literary history: a sentimental novel of innocence, seduction, betrayal, exile, and ruin. Young Charlotte is persuaded to leave England with the British officer Montraville, believing herself loved and protected. Instead, she is carried across the Atlantic into isolation, abandonment, poverty, and disgrace, while the promises made to her collapse under ambition, weakness, and social indifference.

First published in London in 1791 as Charlotte, A Tale of Truth and published in America in 1794, Susanna Haswell Rowson's novel became a cultural phenomenon. Its story of a young woman destroyed by misplaced trust spoke powerfully to early American readers and helped make the seduction novel one of the defining forms of the period. More than a moral warning, Charlotte Temple exposes the vulnerability of women in a world where reputation, family authority, money, and male conduct could determine a woman's entire fate.

Readers interested in early American fiction, women writers, sentimental novels, seduction narratives, and the history of popular reading will find Charlotte Temple essential. It is a landmark in the development of American literary culture: a book once read with extraordinary intensity, repeatedly reprinted, and remembered as one of the first great publishing successes of the new republic.