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Despite Catharine Maria Sedgwick's many personal and professional links to Nathaniel Hawthorne and her international renown as an author in the nineteenth century, few Hawthorne or Sedgwick biographers or literary scholars have considered her possible influence on Hawthorne. Fifteen years Hawthorne's senior, Sedgwick was well established in her career by the time he began publishing in 1830; for the next twenty years the two authors' short works were often published in the same journals and gift-book annuals-including The Token, The U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review, Go deys Ladys Book, and Grahams Magazine- even appearing side by side.1 By the time Hawthorne's first stories appeared anonymously in The Token and The Salem Gazette, Sedgwick had published five books and eighteen short stories and sketches. Because, like Hawthorne, Sedgwick initially published anonymously, in her case with a "by the author of" byline, readers might mistakenly assume that Hawthorne was unaware of whose work he was reading. But from the outset Sedgwick's authorship was no secret, particularly in Boston and New York City circles, as several sources attest, including the private correspondence of Elizabeth and Mary Peabody in the 1820s.2 Not only did Hawthorne undoubtedly read Sedgwick, but evidence suggests that his career was, in some part, influenced by hers.
Nevertheless, in my incomplete survey of a dozen Hawthorne biographies, from Newton Arvin's of 1929 to Robert Milder's of 2013, only half contain Sedgwick's name, two literally just her name. Of the four others, Robert Cantwell (in 1971) gets Sedgwick's age wrong-by a decade-in his two sentences about her presence in Lenox (433), and Arlin Turner (in 1980) mentions only a tea party (211). James Mellow (in 1980) is the only one to acknowledge Sedgwick's "international reputation"; his four sentences include Hawthorne's "rather feeble" reference to the "most truthful" Sedgwick in A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (323). Most recently, Brenda Wineapple's three brief mentions (in 2004) culminate in Sedgwick's negative comment (in a private letter to her niece) about The House of the Seven Gables, removed from its largely positive context.I. * 3 In all, that is about ten sentences in 84 years.4
Only two biographical studies of Sedgwick exist: Mary E. Dewey's 1871 Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick (excerpted letters with biographical segues,...