Clarence: or, A Tale of Our Own Times (Broadview Editions)

Honorable mention recipient for the 2012 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Award.

A pioneering American novel of manners first published in 1830, Catharine Sedgwick’s Clarence follows heiress Gertrude Clarence as she negotiates the perils of the marriage market in New York City. Giving Gertrude’s family English and Caribbean histories, Sedgwick aligns the United States in the 1820s with a larger Atlantic world. This edition of Sedgwick’s cosmopolitan novel will contribute to a rethinking both of the history of the American novel of manners and to the shape of Sedgwick’s career as one of the most important novelists of the first half of the nineteenth century.

This Broadview edition offers a rich selection of contextual materials, including selections from Sedgwick’s correspondence and journals reconstructing the origins of the novel, engravings and lithographs of key sites in the novel, American and British reviews of the novel, and documentation of the author’s revised edition of 1849.

Melissa J. Homestead is Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Ellen A. Foster is Associate Professor of English at Clarion University of Pennsylvania.