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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The writings of Charles Brockden Brown have evoked a number of curious judgments: Shelley's admiration of Constantia Dudley, for instance, and Margaret Fuller's intimation that she herself might have been a worthy companion for so intellectual and sensitive a man as Brown. Anyone deceived by Brown's fiction is in distinguished company certainly, for even the fastidious Hawthorne and the critical Poe thought well of his work. Whether all the extravagances he evokes redound to his credit is perhaps a matter of opinion, but it is hardly to his credit as a novelist that his fiction should not be recognized as such. Recently, however, what is clearly his attempt to write an epistolary novel of a grand passion, in the manner of Werther and La Nouvelle Héloise, has been misread and offered as providing biographical data.
1 Charles Brockden Brown (Durham, 1952), p. 55. References to this book are hereafter in the text. There is a 17th letter, addressed to a man; from “bantering” allusions to Henrietta, the letter progresses to a discussion of the correspondent's literary efforts (pp. 49-50).
2 The Life of Charles Brockden Brown (Philadelphia, 1815), i, 69 (italics of the original).
3 The early epistolary romance printed by Dunlap (i, 108-169) has a similar mixing of the names Sophia and Julia.
4 Charles Brockden Brown, “The Man at Home,” The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. Harry R. Warfel (New York, 1943), p. 74.
5 D. L. Clark, “Unpublished Letters of Charles Brockden Brown and W. W. Wilkins,” Studies in English (Univ. of Texas), xxvii (June 1948), 82.
6 After 8 pages of verse cluttered with useless modifiers, the reader does not take the adjective “Fair” seriously (line 18, p. 325). Moreover, the “Fair Friend” is described in the same religious terms as “Acasto.”
7 If Brown can be credited with ever paying any real attention to what he wrote, he might have seen that his “Acasto” resembled John Blair Linn, poet and preacher, sufficiently to justify, if anything can do so, adding a “Calista” derived from Elizabeth Linn to a poem addressed to “Acasto.”
8 Clark, “Unpublished Letters,” p. 84.