The Coquette and The Boarding School
Hannah Webster Foster based The Coquette on the true story of Elizabeth Whitman, an unmarried woman who died in childbirth in New England. Fictionalizing Whitman’s experiences in her heroine, Eliza Wharton, Foster created a compelling narrative of seduction that was hugely successful with readers. The Boarding School, a less widely known work by Foster, is…
Playing Preceptress – having fun during a pandemic with Hannah Webster Foster’s The Boarding School
Jonathan Beecher Field, Clemson University I teach Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette whenever I can, because it is one of those 1790 epistolary novels that remains sadly relevant to the lives of my students. If you have not had the pleasure, it’s a novel about a young woman named Eliza Wharton. At the beginning of…