Type of Document	Dissertation
Author	Elmore, Jenifer Lynn Bobo
URN	etd-03132003-165536
Title	Sacred Unions: Catharine Sedgwick, Maria Edgeworth, and Domestic-Political Fiction
Degree	Doctor of Philosophy
Department	English, Department of
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Dennis Moore Committee Chair David Johnson Committee Co-Chair Chanta Haywood Committee Member Eric Walker Committee Member Helen Burke Committee Member Julia Stern Committee Member Sally Hadden Committee Member
Keywords	Maria Edgeworth Political Fiction Catherine Sedgewick
Date of Defense	2003-01-01
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract Since the 1980s, literary scholars in the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S. have recovered the contributions of the nineteenth-century American writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick and her older Anglo-Irish contemporary Maria Edgeworth, establishing both as groundbreaking contributors to their respective national literatures. This dissertation casts new light on both authors by examining their private writings to reconstruct their actual historical relationship to one another and by interpreting their published works in a transatlantic and post-colonial context. Reading their works side by side reveals that both authors were preoccupied with modeling Union—the harmonious union of qualities within the individual, of husbands and wives, of disparate groups within larger societies, and, most importantly, of member states within larger political nations, such as Edgeworth’s United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and Sedgwick’s young United States of America. Though Sedgwick and Edgeworth lived an ocean apart and never met in person, their literary celebrity and shared literary project connected them. Throughout her career, Sedgwick’s readers and critics compared her style, her subject matter, her literary and social mission, and indeed the totality of her literary persona to that of Edgeworth. The dedication of Sedgwick’s first novel, A New-England Tale (1822), is an encomium to Edgeworth that establishes how much the novice American admired this mature writer who had already achieved enormous transatlantic literary stature. Edgeworth’s response to that dedication initiated an occasional correspondence between the two women, and Sedgwick continued to inscribe her fiction with intertextual references to Edgeworth. Important points of intersection between Sedgwick’s and Edgeworth’s oeuvres include their literary treatments of women and their writings about women writers, their pioneering literary regionalism, their fictional representations of socioeconomic and ethnic others, and their use of allegory to infuse domestic fictions with national political significance. Both writers employ various narrative strategies in presenting the many aspects of their social and political philosophies to the public in a fictional and often coded form that this dissertation theorizes as the sub-genre of domestic-political fiction. This sub-genre was the means through which both authors modeled their ideals of perfect Union.
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