Charlotte Temple

<p><strong><em>Charlotte Temple</em> is one of the great early bestsellers of American literary history: a sentimental novel of innocence seduction betrayal exile and ruin.</strong> Young Charlotte is persuaded to leave England with the British officer Montraville believing herself loved and protected. Instead she is carried across the Atlantic into isolation abandonment poverty and disgrace while the promises made to her collapse under ambition weakness and social indifference.</p><p>First published in London in 1791 as <em>Charlotte A Tale of Truth</em> and published in America in 1794 Susanna Haswell Rowson's novel became a cultural phenomenon. Its story of a young woman destroyed by misplaced trust spoke powerfully to early American readers and helped make the seduction novel one of the defining forms of the period. More than a moral warning <em>Charlotte Temple</em> exposes the vulnerability of women in a world where reputation family authority money and male conduct could determine a woman's entire fate.</p><p>Readers interested in early American fiction women writers sentimental novels seduction narratives and the history of popular reading will find <em>Charlotte Temple</em> essential. It is a landmark in the development of American literary culture: a book once read with extraordinary intensity repeatedly reprinted and remembered as one of the first great publishing successes of the new republic.</p>