Hope Leslie
by Catharine Sedgwick

Hope Leslie: Genre 1 key example

Preface
Explanation and Analysis:

Hope Leslie is a historical romance. As the preface indicates, the novel aims to present a picture of "the character of the times" two centuries before Sedgwick was writing. It does this by taking a moment in history, when the Puritans were first colonizing Massachusetts, and dramatizing it through larger-than-life characters and a grandiose plot. The novel does not pretend to be factual, but it weaves in real historical figures such as John Eliot so that readers have the sense that a historical moment is coming alive on the page before them. As other historical romances did, it also starts off each chapter with a literary epigraph, or thematic quote. These epigraphs tie the novel into a literary history, so that readers immediately see the novel as a cultural artifact on par with the books quoted at the start of each chapter.