Eighteenth-century readers were just as interested in gossip—especially about the rich and powerful—as contemporary readers. This volume contains the full text of William Hill Brown’s 1789 novel The Power of Sympathy and the related plays Sans Souci, alias, Free and Easy and Occurrences of the Times, all of which draw on contemporary scandal and intrigue among the elite of Boston in constructing their plots. The literary works collected here used a combination of sentiment and satire to address the public and private moral corruption and structural inequalities that made young American women especially vulnerable—and burdened them as symbols of national virtue. Situating the works within their milieu, the editors highlight the experiences of actual readers to explain why these scandals were so compelling on personal and political levels.
Historical documents provide further context for the events, including debates about women’s education and political agency; the post-Revolutionary cultural work of novels, plays, and poetry; and controversies surrounding literary and journalistic representations of seduction, suicide, and other instances of unregulated passion.
Comments
“In their new edition of The Power of Sympathy, Jennifer Harris and Bryan Waterman deftly contextualize William Hill Brown’s novel. Their introduction charts the myriad reactions of eighteenth-century readers to the moralizing impulses of Brown’s ‘founded on fact’ fiction, an editorial approach that opens up ways for contemporary students to explore Brown’s novel as one crucial nodal point in an early American social network. Suggestively crafted by Harris and Waterman to ask students to consider what it felt like to be a ‘young American’ in the ‘aftermath of the Revolution,’ this vivid and lively contemporary edition of an eighteenth-century standard will reshape how we teach and understand The Power of Sympathy for years to come.” — Duncan Faherty, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY
“This new edition of The Power of Sympathy will give students and scholars more than a window onto the first American novel. Harris and Waterman provide an account of the Fanny Apthorp scandal that inspired the book, but they have also given their readers access to another published version of the scandal and, most impressively, the reactions of readers at the time. The sentimental novels of the early Republic were more than mere fictions; they blurred the line between truth and falsehood, and they invited readers to speculate about the real lives of the people they ostensibly depicted. Harris and Waterman enable readers to see how those who participated in, retold, gossiped about, and read about the Apthorp scandal understood it. This edition should be on the shelf of any serious student or scholar of the early American Republic.” — Gordon Fraser, University of Manchester
