The Linwoods Read online

  v

  viiDEDICATION

  to

  LOUISA MINOT,

  These volumes are inscribed by their author, as an expression of that friendship which was begun in youth, and has increased with every added year of life.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Volume I

  Preface

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Volume II

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Note to Volume Second

  About the Author

  Also by Catharine Maria Sedgwick

  Credits

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ixINTRODUCTION

  by

  MARGOT LIVESEY

  Catharine Maria Sedgwick would not, I think, be surprised to find her work and name seldom mentioned nowadays—even in those university courses that focus on the work of women writers or on nineteenth-century history. Here she is in 1831, at the age of forty-two, describing a busy visit to Washington, D.C.: “You can merely exchange half a dozen conventional phrases such as ‘when did you come?’ ‘are you pleased?’ ‘how long do you stay?’ And from the more common and less practiced sort of people you get an ‘I’m already acquainted with you thro’ your books ma’am’—and it may chance a few washy compliments.” She continues, “I find my reputation far greater than I deserve—the world is good natured and kind hearted especially to what they consider respectable mediocrity, for it neither alarms their pride nor provokes their envy.”

  “Respectable mediocrity” indeed! Sedgwick’s novels and short stories were, during her lifetime, widely read, and she was regarded, along with Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, and the somewhat younger Nathaniel Hawthorne, as a founder of American literature. But in that mysterious fashion that sometimes befalls writers, her work has fallen out of favour. (Keats’s work largely disappeared for almost fifty years after his death, Woolf’s for thirty.) And Sedgwick is, as the above makes clear, not the best ambassador for her work. Although pleased by praise and by her growing fame, she was in her diary and autobiography almost invariably self-deprecating. More than most xforgotten writers, she needs someone to blow her trumpet. (In my efforts to do this I am much indebted to the work of the historian and social scientist Mary Kelley.)

  The Linwoods; or, “Sixty Years Since” in America was published in 1835. Sedgwick was forty-six, and her third novel, Hope Leslie (1827), had done particularly well. Set during Puritan times, Hope Leslie followed the friendship between a white girl and the daughter of a Pequot chief as they struggle to right various wrongs. Now, in The Linwoods, she once again returned to the origins of her native land—the novel is set during the War of Independence—and throughout the exciting story Sedgwick tells, her thinking about America, its unique strengths and virtues, are vividly on display. The Monthly Review claimed, “The Story abounds with heart-stirring events and incidents, and with a finely varied and contrasted array of characters.” And the North American Review praised the wide canvas of the novel and the heroism of the characters. But it is probably the comment of Edgar Allan Poe, reviewing the novel for the Southern Literary Messenger, that strikes the modern reader. He signals out for praise Bessie Lee, the young woman from a New England farm who descends into madness. “[I]n the creation of Bessie Lee,” Poe writes, “Miss Sedgwick has given evidence not to be disputed, of a genius far more than common. We do not hesitate to call it a truly beautiful and original conception.” Even now, when depression and madness are familiar territory, Sedgwick’s deeply interior creation of Bessie, and the vivid poetry she creates in her part of the narrative, has a remarkable force. Sedgwick is sometimes described as the creator of the American novel of manners—an inheritor of Jane Austen’s elegant quill—but in her treatment of Bessie, she is much closer to Wuthering Heights than to Pride and Prejudice. (She would not, I should say, regard this as a compliment: she wrote to her niece that she hoped she was not wasting her time on Wuthering Heights—“that little family in hell.”)

  xiI confess I came to The Linwoods knowing little about Sedgwick, and almost nothing about the period in which the novel is set. At once I was seduced by her characters and their situation. The novel opens beguilingly with a description of Isabella Linwood, the strong-willed heroine, and her friend Bessie going to visit a fortune-teller in New York. Bessie is trying to dissuade Isabella from this errand—it’s late, fortune-telling is a bad idea—when they run into Isabella’s brother, Herbert, and his friend Jasper Meredith returning from a day’s shooting. The four proceed to visit the fortune-teller, Effie. We feel the uneasy lure of Effie’s words, even as we are invited to be skeptical of her skills: “This last was one of Effie’s staple prophecies, and was sure to be verified in the varied web of every individual’s experience.” (p. 15) From this inviting opening, the novel leaps forward several years to follow these four young people, along with Bessie Lee’s brother, Eliot, during the war of independence. Our quartet, we discover, are divided in their loyalties: Isabella’s father is a staunch Tory, but her brother, along with Bessie’s, joins Washington’s army. Meanwhile Meredith, who has grown up in England, vacillates about joining the English.

  Even for a contemporary writer, with far more freedom to do research, the story Sedgwick tells would be ambitious. She writes about romance and domestic life, but she also writes about soldiers and intrigue and army life and bandits. General Washington is a character; so too is Lafayette (whose inclusion she explains in an afterword.) She depicts the uncertainties of love and the false blandishments of charm; she also writes about the complexities of loyalty and of making difficult choices. While men are the main actors, Isabella is a resourceful and empathetic heroine who guides her family through the difficult months after her brother fails to follow their father in his English sympathies. Although marriage is the key issue for the younger women, they are, to a surprising xiiextent, in control of their destinies, and The Linwoods also features two strong-minded widows. While most of characters are white, Rose, the steadfast and quick-witted maid, is black and is treated with respect and integrity.

  Several of the main themes of the novel have their sources in Sedgwick’s life. Born in 1789, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Catharine was the sixth of seven children. Her father, a judge, served in the House of Representatives and was away from home for long periods, usually in winter. Sedgwick records the joy of his returns, the sorrow of his departures. Her mother was prone to depression and sometimes sent away under the care of a doctor. The mainstay of the household was a former slave, Elizabeth Freeman (known as Mum
bet—pronounced “ma-bet”) who came to work for the family after the judge had helped to win her freedom in 1781. When Sedgwick’s mother died in 1807, it was Mumbet who urged her to stop crying: “We must be quiet. Don’t you think I am grieved? Our hair has grown white together.”

  The two central aspects of Sedgwick’s psychic life, as it comes across in her diary, are her spinsterhood and her devotion to her four brothers—a devotion always complicated by the knowledge that she did not come first in their lives. Her last major work was a novel titled Married or Single? (1857), in which she allows the heroine to marry at the end. We will never know the full story as to why she turned down her several suitors—one account claims she had twenty-four—but we do know that in 1812 she was courted by and subsequently rejected William Jarvis. More than two decades later Jarvis shot himself in the heart. Sedgwick’s diary entry after hearing the news is revealing. She describes how, urged on by her brother Harry, she had allowed the handsome Jarvis to court her, but, while they were apart for the winter, she never answered his letters. Finally, impelled by a dream, she writes to him to break things off. In the dream:

  xiiiMy family were assembled. We were standing up, and Dr. West had begun the ceremony when making a last effort, I begged him to stop and turning to Jarvis said, “I cannot marry you. I do not love you!” He looked at me far more in sorrow than in anger. I shall never forget the expression and said, “You should have told me this before!” Immediately after receiving my letter he went to Pittsfield and married a few months (later)—a commonplace girl—a poor thing. . . . A man of right character would never have made it—poor fellow.

  There is also some evidence that Sedgwick’s brothers were possessive of their sister and advised her against various suitors.

  Whatever the truth, we do know that her adored father remarried promptly after her mother died and that none of his children liked his new wife. And so Sedgwick, aged eighteen, began her peripatetic life, moving among the households of various siblings, entering fully into the lives of them and their families. As an adult, she never had her own home. In 1837, aged nearly fifty, she wrote a long diary entry, scrupulously noting and quantifying the affections of her siblings. Of her brother Robert she writes, “He had been father, lover as well as brother to me, and when in the inevitable concentration of a closer tie I felt an aching void, I expressed it as I should not. . . . Now after five years of separation from him I daily, almost hourly, mourn him.”

  No wonder that brothers play such a key role in The Linwoods. The hero is not only a good soldier and a person of courage and integrity, he is, crucially, a good brother. And of course good brothers imply good sisters; Isabella, for all her occasional faults, valiantly defends Herbert from xivher father’s wrath and from other dangers occasioned by him returning secretly to New York, which is held by the English, to visit his family.

  Several early reviewers described The Linwoods as a domestic novel. To my mind, one of Sedgwick’s great accomplishments is to domesticate the war. There are almost no anonymous soldiers here; few guns are fired; but she gets at the heart of the complicated choice that faced Americans at that time. Would they continue to pay tribute to the country that many regarded, in some sense, as home? Or would they strive for independence and new kinds of democracy? Sedgwick’s characters fight on both sides but her ending makes clear her choice of American values: Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau were already hard at work.

  The Linwoods is not, however, a diatribe or an argument. It is an adventure story—a romance—and I turned the pages with increasing speed because I wanted the good characters to find each other and the bad to get their comeuppance, or at least be banished to some distant place. Sedgwick knows how to please her reader. People are tried and tested; they make mistakes and are allowed second chances; they fall in love with the wrong people and recover and, if they’re lucky, fall in love with the right people. Like Dickens’s London, Sedgwick’s New York and surrounding countryside can often seem a mere pocket handkerchief, a few square acres, where everyone is always running into everyone else, but I happily suspended my disbelief because of the many pleasures her plot affords. And besides, Sedgwick is excellent at describing food, travel (which she loved), and the way in which nature can be a portal to the spiritual life. A hundred and seventy-nine years after it was first published, the novel still has a freshness and vitality that allows us to enter into the lives of her characters.

  Here is Bessie Lee writing to her brother Eliot about her unrequited love for Meredith on little scraps of paper:

  xv“Oh, Eliot, pray—pray come home! They are all persecuting me. The children laugh at me, and whistle after me; and when I am asleep, they blow his name in my ears. Mother looks at me, and will not speak.

  “They have printed up all the books. Even the Bible has nothing but his name from beginning to end. I can never be alone; evil spirits are about me by day and night;—my brother I am tormented.”

  Bessie Lee’s subsequent flight—she steals a horse and sets out for New York to find Meredith—is poignantly rendered and the denouement. . . .

  But no, I won’t tell you, because I hope you’ll have the gorgeous surprise of turning these pages for yourself and reading what Bessie Lee has been planning all along. It’s time—more than time—for Catharine Maria Sedgwick to rejoin her literary brothers on the bookshelves of libraries and homes in the country she took such pleasure in commending for its sense of justice, democracy, and reinvention.

  1VOLUME I

  3PREFACE

  The title* of these volumes will render their readers liable to a disappointment, from which a few prefatory words may save them. It was chosen simply to mark the period of the story, and that period was selected as one to which an American always gratefully recurs, and as affording a picturesque light for domestic features. The writer has aimed to exhibit the feeling of the times, and to give her younger readers a true, if a slight, impression of the condition of their country at the most—the only suffering period of its existence, and by means of this impression to deepen their gratitude to their patriot-fathers; a sentiment that will tend to increase their fidelity to the free institutions transmitted to them. Historic events and war details have been avoided; the writer happily being aware that no effort at

  “A swashing and a martial outside”

  would conceal the weak and unskilled woman.

  A very few of our “immortal names” have been introduced, with what propriety the reader must determine. It 4may be permitted to say, in extenuation of what may seem presumption, that whenever the writer has mentioned Washington, she has felt a sentiment resembling the awe of the pious Israelite when he approached the ark of the Lord.

  For the rest, the author of these volumes is most happy in trusting to the indulgent disposition which our American public constantly manifest towards native literature.

  5CHAPTER I.

  “Un notable exemple de la forcenée curiosité de notre

  nature, s’amusant se préoccuper des choses futures, comme

  si elle n’avoit pas assez à faire à désirer les présentes.”

  –MONTAIGNE.

  Some two or three years before our revolutionary war, just at the close of day, two girls were seen entering Broadway through a wicket garden-gate, in the rear of a stately mansion which fronted on Broad-street, that being then the court-end of the city—the residence of unquestioned aristocracy—(sic transit gloria mundi!) whence royal favour and European fashions were diffused through the province of New-York.

  The eldest of the two girls had entered on her teens. She was robust and tall for her years, with the complexion of a Hebe, very dark hair, an eye (albeit belonging to one of the weaker sex) that looked as if she were born to empire—it might be over hearts and eyes—and the step of a young Juno. The younger could be likened neither to goddess, queen, nor any thing that assumed or loved command. She was of earth’s gentlest and finest mould—framed for all tender humanities, with the destiny of
woman written on her meek brow. “Thou art born to love, to suffer, to obey,—to minister, and not to be ministered to.” Well did she fulfil her mission! The girls were followed by a black servant in livery. The elder pressed forward as if impelled by some powerful motive, while her companion lagged behind,—sometimes chasing a 6young bird, then smelling the roses that peeped through the garden-paling; now stopping to pat a good-natured mastiff, or caress a chubby child: many a one attracted her with its broad shining face and linsey-woolsey short-gown and petticoat, seated with the family group on the freshly-scoured stoops of the Dutch habitations that occurred at intervals on their way. “Come, do come along, Bessie, you are stopping for every thing,” said her companion, impatiently. Poor Bessie, with the keenest sensibility, had, what rarely accompanies it, a general susceptibility to external impressions,—one might have fancied she had an extra set of nerves. When the girls had nearly reached St. Paul’s church, their attendant remonstrated,—“Miss Isabella, you are getting quite out to the fields—missis said you were only going a turn up the Broadway.”

  “So I am, Jupe.”

  “A pretty long turn,” muttered Jupiter; and after proceeding a few paces further, he added, in a raised voice, “the sun is going down, Miss Isabella.”

  “That was news at 12 o’clock, Jupiter.”

  “But it really is nearly set now, Isabella,” interposed her companion Bessie.

  “Well, what if it is, Bessie?—it is just the right time—Effie is always surest between sundown and dark.”

  “Mercy, Isabella! you are not going to Effie’s. It is horrid to go there after sundown—please Isabella, don’t.” Isabella only replied by a “pshaw, child!” and a laugh.

  Bessie mustered her moral courage (it required it all to oppose Isabella), and stopping short, said, “I am not sure it is right to go there at all.”

  “There is no right nor wrong in the matter, Bessie,—you are always splitting hairs.” Notwithstanding her bold profession, Isabella paused, and with a tremulousness of voice that indicated she was not indifferent to the cardinal points in her 7path of morality, she added,—“why do you think it is not right, Bessie?”