The Coquette

By Hannah Webster Foster

Book Overview

The Coquette tells the much-publicized story of the seduction and death of Elizabeth Whitman, a poet from Hartford, Connecticut.
Written as a series of letters--between the heroine and her friends and lovers--it describes her long, tortuous courtship by two men, neither of whom perfectly suits her. Eliza Wharton (as Whitman is called in the novel) wavers between Major Sanford, a charming but insincere man, and the Reverend Boyer, a bore who wants to marry her. When, in her mid-30s, Wharton finds herself suddenly abandoned when both men marry other women, she willfully enters into an adulterous relationship with Sanford and becomes pregnant. Alone and dejected, she dies in childbirth at a roadside inn. Eliza Wharton, whose real-life counterpart was distantly related to Hannah Foster's husband, was one of the first women in American fiction to emerge as a real person facing a dilemma in her life. In her Introduction, Davidson discusses the parallels between Elizabeth Whitman and the fictional Eliza Wharton. She shows the limitations placed on women in the 18th century and the attempts of one woman to rebel against those limitations.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195042395
• ISBN13: 9780195042399
• Release Date: February 1987
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

The Coquette

This is a great story and I enjoyed reading it. Wharton's story revisits ground so many young girls and women walk upon. I see its moral value and educational value rather than its place in literature. I see a reminder to both young men and women that life's consequences visit upon us no matter who we are, especially women in love. Yes, the ruling class at the time stood alongside the shop keepers and emerging working-class and field workers. Of course times have changed and so too have the privileges, thanks to medicine, mobility, and the Internet; yet the problems for women continue today as they did at the turn of the eighteenth century. A good story seldom grows to old to help clarify the ground that we might still walk on, figuratively speaking. I will add this story to my Kindle in case my wife chooses to read it. She likes to share stories with her neices. Eddie Evans