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Among important early American women novelists. Martha Meredith Read (fl. 1801 - 1807) remains neglected. The author of two novels -- Monima, or the Beggar Girl (1802) and Margaretta; or, the Intricacies of the Heart (1807) -- as well as a feminist tract entitled "A Second Vindication of the Rights of Women" (1801), Read has been linked only to the first of these. Critics of Monima have occasionally praised Read's mordant realism (Davidson 258), but they have more often seen the novel as expressing the well-worn pieties of its era. To Herbert Ross Brown, Read is an adept practitioner of sentimental excess (172); to Henri Petter she is "all too familiar" (234); and to Caroline Zilboorg she offers conventional, if ingenious, support for "American piety" and virtue (450). No one, though, has sought to deepen this portrait by linking Monima to the feminist tract with which it was serialized in Isaac Ralston's short-lived Ladies' Monitor in 1801 -- a tract that attempts to challenge convention.(1) Nor has anyone, to my knowledge, linked Read to Margaretta, which was also briefly serialized in the journal and attributed to her.(2) In Monima Read uses anxieties over the decline of Federalist power to imagine a more energetic role for women.(3) In this essay I will explore the feminist implications of Margaretta, arguing that Read used this novel of manners to capture the hidden costs of female authorship in the early republic.
Like many women writers of the period, Read has left little record beyond her published work. The daughter of Margaret Cadwalader and Samuel Meredith, a Revolutionary War officer whose prominence in Philadelphia society was indicated by the mansion he occupied across from Independence Hall, Martha married John Read, Jr., on June 25, 1796. Read himself came from distinguished stock -- his father signed the Declaration of Independence -- and he became equally prominent, serving as Agent General of the United States in the settlement of the Jay Treaty with Great Britain and later as president of the Philadelphia Bank. Reference to and letters written by Martha occasionally surface among his papers preserved at the Library Company of Philadelphia. There is an angry letter from Read to his father-in-law denouncing Meredith's tangled finances, to which Martha plaintively added how...