Reuben and Rachel (Paperback)

Paperback. Susanna Haswell Rowson, a popular and prolific writer, actress, and educator in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had a truly transatlantic life and career, moving twice from England to America and publishing extensively in both countries. A transatlantic sensibility informs her fictionalized history of America, Reuben and Rachel, which traces ten generations of an extended family, beginning with the marriage of Christopher Columbuss son to a native Peruvian princess, moving through the Tudor succession crises and the colonial settlement of New England, and ending with the title characters, who leave England for America, renounce titles of nobility, and consider their children true-born Americans. In Rowsons representation, the American character derives from fusion and hybridity, the results of intermarriage across racial, religious and national lives. Previously out of print, Reuben and Rachel traces American history in the many generations of one family, emphasizing the stories of women and Native Americans. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …