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.
This genre was popularized in the early 19th century by the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott. Scott's Waverley novels are particularly emblematic of the genre. Scott was a Unionist, meaning that he favored the union of Scotland with England and embraced the industrialization of Scotland under English rule, but he was also deeply interested in the preservation of Scottish national history. His Waverley novels look back on key moments in Sottish history and present fictionalized accounts of those events as a kind of folklore for readers to hold onto as Scotland moved into an industrial future as part of Great Britain. The novels feature many plot twists as well as cross-cultural love affairs and family entanglements. They are often nostalgic about the "pure" culture of Scottish Highlanders—culture that was, as far as Scott was concerned, tragically doomed to die out.
The genre Scott popularized became favored in the United States, especially among white writers, because it was well-suited to thinking about the politics of land claims. James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child, and Sedgwick all wrote popular historical romances. As Sedgwick's novel makes clear by naming the Fletchers' settlement "Bethel" (a disputed border city in the Bible), the Puritans have claimed land throughout the Northeast that already belonged to American Indian nations. Like Scott, Sedgwick imagines that history is more or less settled in her day. She writes in the preface that American Indians are "conquered" before going on to write:
These volumes are so far from being intended as a substitute for genuine history, that the ambition of the writer would be fully gratified if, by this work, any of our young countrymen should be stimulated to investigate the early history of their native land.
The "young countrymen" she describes are by and large white American citizens, and she calls North America their "native land." As far as she is concerned, white settlers have replaced American Indians as "native" inhabitants of North America. She takes United States sovereignty as a bygone conclusion, just like Scott does with English sovereignty in Scotland. What her novel aims to do is reexamine a moment when she imagines this question was less settled. By telling the sentimental story of Hope, Magawisca, Everell, Faith, Oneco, Mononotto, and the rest, Sedgwick wants to help U.S. citizens hold onto their cultural connection to Puritans and American Indians while the country moves (in Sedgwick's flawed understanding) beyond them.
