Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts

Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts, is a novel by Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Published as two volumes in 1827, it received critical acclaim and success. Given the time in which it was published, and the time and place it portrays (seventeenth-century New England), it is impossible to read Hope Leslie without comparing it to contemporary novels such as The Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper. Many have argued that Sedgwick’s place in the formation of American literature is at least as foundational as Cooper’s.

On the surface, Hope Leslie appears to reinforce several dominant ideas of the time: for instance, the Indians are often referred to as “savages,” a woman’s place is in the home, and courtly love with all its proprieties must be observed unless one is willing to risk scandal. On closer examination, Sedgwick challenges many of these ideas. While there are, indeed, many references to Native Americans that would be at home in other stereotypical frontier stories, there are others that give Indigenous peoples more credit than they had ever been given before. Magawisca, daughter of a Pequod chief who works for one of the settler families, is the only character in the novel of such courage, equanimity, and grace, that two of the pivotal white characters beg her for moral guidance near the end of Volume Two.