The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Coquette, by Hannah Webster Foster

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Title: The Coquette
The History of Eliza Wharton

Author: Hannah Webster Foster

Release Date: May 25, 2004 [EBook #12431]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: Eliza Wharton]

THE
COQUETTE;
OR,
THE HISTORY OF
ELIZA WHARTON.

A NOVEL:
FOUNDED ON FACT.

BY
A LADY OF MASSACHUSETTS.

HISTORICAL PREFACE,
INCLUDING
A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.

He who waits beside the folded gates of mystery, over which forever
float the impurpled vapors of the PAST, should stand with girded loins,
and white, unshodden feet. So he who attempts to lift the veil that
separates the REAL from the IDEAL, or to remove the heavy curtain that
for a century may have concealed from view the actual personages of a
well-drawn popular fiction, or what may have been received as such,
should bring to his task a tender heart and a delicate and gentle hand.

Thus, in preparing an introductory chapter for these pages which are to
follow, many and various thoughts suggest themselves, and it is
necessary to recognize and pursue them with gentleness and caution.

The romance of "Eliza Wharton" appeared in print not many years
subsequent to the assumed transactions it so faithfully attempts to
record. Written as it was by one highly educated for the times,--the
popular wife of a popular clergyman, connected in no distant degree, by
marriage, with the family of the heroine, and one who by the very
profession and position of her husband was, as by necessity, brought
into the sphere of actual intercourse with the principal characters of
the novel, and as the book also took precedence in time of all American
romances, when, too, the literature of the day was any thing but
"_light_"--it is not surprising that it thus took precedence in interest
as well of all American novels, at least throughout New England, and was
found, in every cottage within its borders, beside the family Bible, and
though pitifully, yet al