Emily Hamilton and Other Writings

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Emily Hamilton and Other Writings

Sukey Vickery
Edited and with an introduction by Scott Slawinski

Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Series

278 pages

Paperback

September 2009

978-0-8032-1785-0

$30.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

September 2009

978-0-8032-2651-7

$30.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

Sukey Vickery’s Emily Hamilton is an epistolary novel dealing with the courtship and marriages of three women. Originally published in 1803, it is one of the earliest examples of realist fiction in America and a departure from other novels at the turn of the nineteenth century. From the outset its author intended it as a realist project, never delving into the overly sentimental plotting or characterization present in much of the writing of Vickery’s contemporaries. Emily Hamilton explores from a decidedly feminine perspective the idea of a woman’s right to choose her own spouse and the importance of female friendship. Vickery’s characterization of women further diverges from the typical eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century didactic of the righteous/sinful woman and depicts, instead, believable female characters exhibiting true-to-life behavior.
 
A presentation of this novel accompanied by Vickery’s poetry, letters, a diary fragment, and a few nineteenth-century responses to her work, Emily Hamilton and Other Writings is the first complete collection of Vickery’s writings.

Author Bio

Sukey Vickery was born in Leicester, Massachusetts, on June 12, 1779. At age twenty-two she became a published author when her poems appeared in the Massachusetts Spy. Two years later her novel Emily Hamilton appeared in print. After her marriage in 1804 she ceased to publish but continued to write. She died at the untimely age of forty-two.
 
Scott Slawinski is an assistant professor of English at Western Michigan University and the author of Validating Bachelorhood: Audience, Patriarchy, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Editorship of the Monthly Magazine and American Review.

Praise

"Emily Hamilton . . . adds to our knowledge of early republican novels while opening lines of inquiry into established ideas about American realism and American women's writing."—Jill Kirsten Anderson, Legacy

"The careful editing and cogent and engaging introduction to this volume will guide students and scholars alike, thus helping Sukey Vickery's work to receive the attention that it deserves." —Amy E. Winans, Women's Studies

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Text
List of Characters
Emily Hamilton
Poems Published in the Massachusetts Spy
     LINES, Addressed to JOHN ADAMS, ESQ. late PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES
     BEAUTY ADDRESS to PIETY
     CHARACTER of a YOUNG LADY
     To FIDELIA
     To THEODORUS
     RESIGNATION
     To the Memory of Miss H. who departed this life on the 6th of July, after a short illness
     To FIDELIA
     To THEODORUS
     EVENING REFLECTIONS
     [untitled.]
     To EUGENE
     To FIDELIA
     To THEODORUS
     To CONTENT
     LINES,Occasioned by the Death of Miss E ****
     SUMMER
     [untitled.]
     SONNET to FIDELIA
     To FREDERIC
Unpublished Manuscripts
     Ode for the New year. Jan. 1st , 1784
     [Letter to Adeline Hartwell]
     Written after reading some very elegant extracts from Campbell’s pleasures of hope.  Address to Hope
     A tale for those who deal in the marvelous
     [untitled]
     [untitled]
     To Adelaide–
     [Letter to Isaiah Thomas, Junior]
     [Journal]
Appendix
     TRIBUTE to MERIT
     [Review of Emily Hamilton]
Notes

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