Writer and Novelist in Antebellum America
Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) was one of nineteenth-century America's most prolific women writers. She published six novels, two biographies, eight works for children, novellas, over 100 pieces of short prose and other works. Literary critics and historians have recognized her as a primary founder of a distinctly American literature, along with Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Sedgwick's close friend, William Cullen Bryant.
Childhood
Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ninth child of Judge Theodore Sedgwick and Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, was born December 28, 1789 at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the house which her father had built four years before. While Catharine loved and respected her mother, Pamela Sedgwick suffered repeated periods of mental illness and does not seem to have been close to her daughter.
Catharine greatly admired her father, though he was often away for his political career, which culminated in his becoming Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. In his absence Catharine was surrounded by her many siblings. As a young woman, Sedgwick attended Payne's Finishing School in Boston.
Sedgwick was particularly attached to her four brothers, who encouraged her to write. Even when they had all married and become lawyers, her brothers remained the central figures in her emotional life. She passed part of every year in the family of one of her brothers, and was a favorite aunt to many children. Together they worked to sustain her often failing self-confidence, and assisted her with contracts and reviews.
As a child, Catharine Sedgwick was cared for by Elizabeth Freeman, a former slave often called Mum Bett. Sedgwick's father helped Freeman gain her freedom by arguing her case in county court in 1781. After winning her freedom, Freeman accepted the offer to work for the Sedgwicks for wages. Catharine is buried next to Mum Bett in Stockbridge.
Writing Career
Much in demand, from the 1820s to the 1850s Catharine Sedgwick made a good living writing short stories for a variety of periodicals. A writer of juvenile fiction, moral tales and domestic literature as well as numerous novels, Sedgwick was a well-respected literary figure in New England before the appearance of her novel Hope Leslie, now her most popular work.
