Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s early letters document the intellectual development of a prolific woman writer from her childhood in the early national period through the 1813 death of her father Theodore Sedgwick, a Federalist member of Congress and Massachusetts supreme court judge. The youngest daughter in a family of seven siblings, Sedgwick practiced epistolary conventions in her early letters while introducing her lifelong theme of balancing personal and family expectations with the obligation to write. As Sedgwick reported in her later autobiography, she felt that she lacked a satisfactory formal education, but “these great deficiencies” were offset by the quality of her homelife. Her adolescent years were marked by her mother’s chronic ill health and death in 1807, her father’s remarriage in 1808, and her engagement with her siblings’ growing families throughout the period. By 1812, as a 22-year old republican woman reflecting on her social position, CMS felt the call of a “life dignified by usefulness” and compared her father’s contributions to her own potential: “You may benefit a Nation my dear Papa, & I may improve the condition of a fellow being” (1 Mar. 1812).
Letters from Sedgwick’s pre-publication adulthood demonstrate her intellectual and religious development as she grappled with events both personal and national. Her siblings became the central focus of her domestic life, and the Sedgwicks’ experiences with “the market of matrimony” (15 Aug. 1813) provide intriguing fodder for epistolary debate. Sedgwick rejected at least two marriage proposals in her twenties, one in 1812 and another in 1819. In the summer of 1821, she traveled to Niagara Falls and Montreal and began keeping a journal. As Sedgwick developed her authorial persona and worked on her first novel, her full-throated dedication to family, female relationships, and personal usefulness emerged as primary concerns. Sedgwick’s letters also become more philosophical, and her lifelong dedication to republican service and intellectual Unitarianism come into focus. Sedgwick explains her sense of vocation to her lifelong friend Eliza Cabot Follen: “my ministry must be one of watchfulness and steady devotion, and all those cares that love teaches, and can pay without being asked” (15 Nov 1822).
With her first novel A New-England Tale (1822), Sedgwick established herself as a professional writer, and she published four additional literary novels and more than 30 stories during this period. As a dedicated family woman, who also chose to be single and an author, she constructed domestic arrangements that complemented her writing career. She lived in the homes of her brothers and sisters-in-law in Stockbridge, Lenox, and New York City, deepening her relationships with her siblings as well as caring for the children and contributing to their education. Redwood, her second novel, received “much more praise and celebrity than [she] expected” (18 Oct. 1824). As her fame grew, she continued to find her spiritual home in Unitarianism, while her range of acquaintances expanded to include artists, politicians, reformers, educators, and intellectuals. Sedgwick began to travel more widely, visiting friends in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, and making extended trips to Washington DC and the South. As a measure of her celebrity, she was selected for inclusion in the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans (1834), the only woman included other than Martha Washington. The period was also punctuated by “the real and bitter sorrows that cloud our life” (13 Mar. 1830), including the deaths of her sister Eliza, her childhood nurse Elizabeth Freeman, and her brother Harry.
As a member of the American literati, Sedgwick navigated transatlantic fame while experiencing personal loss at home. She pursued new avenues of benevolent activism in her life and writings. Letters from this period will be available soon.
Sedgwick’s engagement with mid-nineteenth-century reform movements informed her writings during this period. Her primary residences continued to be New York City and the Berkshires. She deepened her relationships with her niece Kate Minot and other members of the next generation of Sedgwicks. Letters from this era will be available at a future date.
During the Civil War period, Sedgwick grappled with issues of national importance alongside personal losses at home. She published her last book and final story and, after a medical crisis, resigned as Director of the New York Women’s Prison Association. In her final years, she resided with Kate Minot and her family near Boston. Letters from this era will be available at a future date.
Online version 1.
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- Friendship
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- Morality and Ethics
- Family Residences (Sedgwick Family)
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- Authorship
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- Gender Roles
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You should long ago have had my thanks for your kind letter by Brother Theodore but I have had quite a fit of sickness for me, and probably from not being familiar with the languor and debility that follow it, I have yielded to it with some imbecility, so that you who etherealize on a sickbed, whose subtle spirit escapes from the ills of the flesh, would laugh at the spiritless way in which I yield to them -- -- --
I beleive dear Eliza that keeping company with you, and a few other spirituelles has not been without benefit to me, for though I have been so slightly and gently touched with the rod of correction, I think it has not been entirely without those ‘sweet uses' that are the blessings of adversity 1 in all its varieties -- Some moral and religious views have, as our bungling Country Parsons say been ‘opened up’ to me -- -- and I could not read you a homily upon the ‘advantages of sickness’ 2 but do not be alarmed I am not so presumptious as to make moral reflections to you -- or to boast 2 to you of the virtue of those wells of life, of which you have drank so deeply -- -- -- God grant my dear friend that all the discipline of his Providence may tend to establish the kingdom of our Lord and Master in our hearts; that it may all help to lighten us of the burden of the world, that we may go forward towards the mansions of our Father with a surer and a steadier step --
I do not know when I have looked forward to a Summer with such happy expectation as I do now -- -- I am determined that it shall not be my fault if we do not meet -- I am not without hopes that you will perform your promise and go to NY -- If you do not
I have thought a great deal of the probability you sometime since hinted to me that you should dissolve your present family arrangement in the Spring -- I hope not -- both on yours and Mrs C’s account -- I am in no way qualified to counsel, and can only hope and pray that what arrangement your wisdom shall adopt may result in the happiness of both -- I could find it in my heart to wish that fortune would lavish her gold favors for once on Mrs C -- and yet the wish is worse than idle one, for these same favors are not the bread of the Children of the Kingdom -- -- -- and we should persuade ourselves not to desire them for these noble minds that can be as the yoke of adversity -- --
For my book? 3 -- dearest Eliza my tenderest thanks for your sympathy and interest -- and for putting me in mind 4 of what I should feel -- -- but alas what I cannot -- -- I fear there is nothing dear Eliza in the thing that will ever make thy blue eye sparkle -- but I am sure there is nothing in the moral and purpose for which you need to blush -- -- -- You ask me to tell you all about it, but I have not the heart to rob it of the little interest that it may possess from novelty -- -- For myself I have got so thoroughly sick of that but for the remonstrance of my friends I think I should make an auto de fe 4 of it at once -- --
Thank you dear for your kindness to my brother -- he is all the better body & spirit for his visit to the Capital -- -- Harry is here and I should return with him, but I am not yet quite strong enough to undertake the journey --
H bids me tell you that he has bought a nice new house -- and expects you to pass next winter in it with me -- Sister Frances is here -- and all the family with one voice claim the privilege of their love to you -- Mine most affy to Mrs Channing & -- to Susan --
God bless you my dearest Eliza -- and take my tenderest blessing for your love to me --
rs
Letter
Massachusetts Historical Society
Catharine Maria Sedgwick I
Wax blot and tears. After Sedgwick's signature, her brother Harry wrote, "In token of ratification H.DS"
Miss Eliza L. Cabot --/No 1 Mount Vernon/Boston --
1824 is written in the upper right corner of page 1
An allusion to William Shakespeare's 1599 comedy As You Like It, Act 2, scene 1.
Possibly a reference to Jeremy Taylor's The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651).
A reference to Sedgwick's soon-to-be-published second novel, Redwood (1824).
An auto da fé is "the public burning of a heretic" (OED).