Carolyn L. Karcher

Set in seventeenth-century New England, Hope Leslie (1827) portrays early American life and celebrates the role of women in building the republic. A counterpoint to the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, it challenges the conventional view of Indians, tackles interracial marriage and cross-cultural friendship, and claims for women their rightful place in history. At the center of the novel are two friends. Hope Leslie, a spirited thinker in a repressive Puritan society, fights for justice for the Indians and asserts the independence of women. Magawisca, the passionate daughter of a Pequot chief, braves her father's wrath to save a white man and risks her freedom to reunite Hope with her long-lost sister, captured as a child by the Pequots and now married to Magawisca's brother. Amply plotted, with unforgettable characters, Hope Leslie is a rich, compelling, deeply satisfying novel.

Taking its title from the accolade William Lloyd Garrison bestowed on Child - "she is the first woman in the republic" - this innovative cultural biography recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-century figure whose career encompassed issues central to American history. Carolyn L. Karcher captures the throes of a tumultuous era that saw the mass transfer of many Native tribes, ferocious mob violence against abolitionists and African American communities, bitter dissension among reformers over tactics and principles, a dramatic transformation in women's lives, a Civil War unprecedented not only for its carnage but also for its character as a liberation struggle, and a tragically aborted Reconstruction. She explores the key role Child played in shaping American culture at a formative moment in its development and reveals her impact on almost every facet of nineteenth-century letters. She also takes readers into the private life of a complex woman, riven by deep contradictions and remarkably honest about her feelings. This definitive biography restores to the public an eloquent writer and reformer who embodied the best of the American democratic heritage.