About
This site, an ongoing work-in-progress, aims to be a comprehensive, searchable digital collection of the stories, tales, and sketches written by Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) between 1822 and 1864 and published originally in 19th-century US periodicals and edited collections.
We are indebted for the bibliographic information initially used to compile the metadata for this site to the following source:
Damon-Bach, Lucinda; Roepsch, Allison; and Homestead, Melissa J., "Chronological Bibliography of the Works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick" (2002). Faculty Publications -- Department of English. Paper 119. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/119
We have also added and corrected bibliographic information based on our own notes and research.
Additions and corrections to the site are welcome.
Project Director and Editor :
Deborah Gussman, Professor of Literature, Stockton University
Contact: deborah dot gussman @ stockton dot edu
Contributing Editor:
Lucinda Damon Bach, Professor of English, Salem State University
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Mission and Goals of Sedgwick Stories
The primary mission of this collection is to close a gap in the recovery of Catharine Sedgwick's work by giving readers and scholars access to the more than one-hundred tales, sketches, stories and miscellaneous writings she published in popular and prestigious magazines, gift books, annuals (often the same ones in which her now more famous male contemporaries like Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, or Nathaniel Hawthorne published), and edited collections.
Sedgwick Stories, as a digital collection, offers readers and scholars the following advantages over a print edition:
- The inclusion of all known tales, sketches, and short stories written and published by Sedgwick;
- Each of the stories is inventoried according to standard metadata (author, date of publication, title of magazine or journal, publisher, city of publication), as well as tagged for keyword information (historical places, persons, themes, and topics, such as New York City, Charles Dickens, romanticism, abolitionism) thus making them easily searchable;
- As an open-source publication, wide availability to the broadest range of users;
- The ability to be updated to add newly discovered published stories, or to correct misattributed works;
- The ability to be expanded to include archival discoveries, including manuscripts and variations of published stories, never-published stories, or uncompleted drafts of stories.
A secondary goal of the site is to ensure that Sedgwick's work continues to be recognized and read, not only by scholars and advanced students, but by all readers of American literature, from middle school through university, as well as the public. Having exposure and access to Sedgwick’s short fiction is crucial to that purpose. Think about how readers are introduced to canonical 19th-century American writers like Irving, Poe, or Hawthorne: it is usually through their short stories. What would an introduction to American Literature be without “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” or “Young Goodman Brown”? Sedgwick's stories not only complement works like these but also expand our understanding of the cultural work of fiction in the 19th century.