Text: James B. Reece, “Catharine Maria Sedgwick,” Poe's Poe and the New York Literati Story, dissertation, 1954 (This material is protected by copyright)

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Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867), a native of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was a descendant of one of the oldest families of the state and the daughter of a distinguished lawyer. She began her education in the district schools and later attended boarding academies in Albany and Boston. For many years of her adult life she lived at Stockbridge or at nearby Lenox but usually spent the winters with relatives in New York. Until she was past thirty she does not appear to have given serious consideration to writing as a career, but in 1822 she was urged to expand an intended religious tract into a novel. The result, A New England Tale, was an immediate success, and the novels which followed in the next decade gained for her a prominent place among American authors. For twenty years following 1830 she wrote frequently for the periodicals and annuals.

Miss Sedgwick's industrious and largely uneventful career was marked by a trip to to Europe in 1839 and a journey to Chicago [page 202:] and St. Louis in 1854. For many years she was president of the Women's Prison Association in New York. She wrote little after 1850, and her literary output virtually ceased with the publication of her last novel, Married or Single (1857).

Her first novel was followed by Redwood (1824), Hope Leslie (1827), Clarence (1830), and The Linwoods (1835). Volumes of Tales and Sketches appeared in 1836 and 1844. Her didactic tales for children include The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man (1836), Live and Let Live (1837), and The Morals of Manners (1846). Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841) was the literary product of her European trip.(1)

Miss Sedgwick, a friend of bliss Lynch's, took a prominent part in social activities of the New York literati, and Poe presumably met her occasionally on evenings when both were guests at the same affair.(2) Their personal contact seems to have been limited to these chance meetings. However, for a decade prior to their meeting Poe had been expressing his opinion, usually favorable, of her literary talents whenever her works came before [page 203:] him in his role as critic.

In reviewing The Linwoods in the Southern Literary Messenger for December, 1835, Poe rated the author first among the female writers of America and, while admitting that it was not a work of the first rank, praised the novel for its style and its verisimilitude. He found in the work passages of the “most exalted poetry — passages which no mind but one thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the beautiful could have conceived.” But he pointed out passages of dialogue inappropriate to the character of the speaker and examples of questionable diction.(3) A month later he reviewed Tales and Sketches, commenting briefly but in general favorably upon individual selections. He thought the work inferior to The Linwoods, however, and warned: “Facilis descensus Averni.”(4) Poe probably was also the author of the notice of The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man in the Messenger for May, 1837. The critic was highly pleased with the “shrewd remarks, the lively delineation, the spirited dialogue, the touching incident” of the book. To have kept within the bounds of the commonplace, he continued, and yet to have “made a story of as much good sense and enhancing interest, — is among the highest triumphs of talent.”(5) ’ In February, 1842, he wrote of Miss Sedgwick's [page 204:] Wealth and Worth: “Its spirit is vigorous and healthy ... its style of composition is chaste, simple and natural, and many of its descriptions are drawn with exquisite grace and beauty The plot is developed without violence to probability .... ”(6)

Poe's opinion of Miss Sedgwick as a creative author was but he did not hesitate to disagree with her when she wandered into criticism. In December, 1841, Poe reviewed in Graham's the Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson, for which Miss Sedgwick had written a biographical sketch. Poe objected to Miss Sedgwick's quoting an opinion of Robert Southey, which she termed “more authoritative” than her own, as an indication of a humiliating subserviency to British critical pronouncement. He also thought that Miss Sedgwick had been too generous in praising the abilities of her subject, a precocious poetess who had died of consumption at the age of sixteen. After quoting Miss Sedgwick's high opinion of one of Miss Davidson's productions, he observed that the “cant of a kind heart when betraying into error a naturally sound judgment, is perhaps the only species of cant in the world not altogether contemptible.”(7)

Miss Sedgwick's reaction to Poe's criticism of her works is not known, but she apparently took some offense at Poe's extremely harsh review of a fellow New Englander, the younger William [page 205:] Ellery Channing, in Graham's for August, 1843. Poe had erred in stating that the poet was the son of the elder Channing.(8) Writing to Graham on August 18, Miss Sedgwick requested that he correct “the mistake made by Mr. Poe in his sarcasms against the Poems of Willm Ellery Channing.”(9)

Poe's final estimate of Miss Sedgwick, the “Literati” sketch, presents her as “one of our most celebrated and most meritorious a writer of “marked talent.” But, asserted Poe, like that of Halleck and other early American writers, owed some of its luster to the mere fact that she was a literary pioneer; the public had overrated her merits. The specific criticism in the sketch concerns The Linwoods and was adapted from the review of that work which had appeared ten years earlier in the Southern Literary Messenger.(10)

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