Recommendations from our site
“Hope Leslie is a historical novel published in 1827 that looks back to seventeenth-century New England…It focuses on the relationship between two young women, the Puritan Hope Leslie and the Pequot Magawisca, as their friendship and loyalties are tested amid rising conflict between white settlers and the region’s Indigenous inhabitants. The literary critic György Lukács argued that the genre of the historical novel—with Walter Scott as his primary example—explores the lives of ordinary people against the backdrop of major events as a means of thinking about how historical forces shape human consciousness, and how a past marked by schisms and conflict could produce a shared national heritage or identity.” Read more...
The Best 19th-Century American Novels
Nathan Wolff, Literary Scholar
