[Brown, William Hill]:

$35,000 · Offered by William Reese Company

THE POWER OF SYMPATHY: OR, THE TRIUMPH OF NATURE. FOUNDED IN TRUTH. First edition of William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, generally regarded as the first American novel. Ostensibly intended to expose "the dangerous Consequences of Seduction" and to set forth "the Advantages of Female Education," The Power of Sympathy is a tale of kidnapping, accidental incest, and suicide. Published anonymously, authorship was long attributed to American poet Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton because the plot is based on incidents in the life of her family, particularly that of her sister, Frances Apthorp. The novel, however, was written by Morton's Boston neighbor, William Hill Brown, who wrote a scandalous tale of seduction, betrayal, kidnapping, and suicide, loosely based on recent and well-publicized tragedies in the Apthorp household. Advertised by its publisher, the prominent Massachusetts printer Isaiah Thomas, as the "first American novel," The Power of Sympathy is generally accepted as such by literary scholars on the basis of the fact that it was "written in America, by an author born in America, published first in America, set in America, concerned with issues that are specifically ground in the new country and not simply transplanted from England" (Davidson). A distinctly American adaptation of the European epistolary romance, with rich descriptions of the Rhode Island landscape and reflections on slavery in America. Rarely seen at all, and generally found as two volumes bound

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