Article Review for Hope Leslie Bell, Michael Davitt. “History and Romance Convention in Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie.” American Quarterly, Volume 22, Issue 2, Part I (Summer, 1970). 213-221 Michael Davitt Bell is a renowned literary researcher whose scholarly work has been mostly focused on nineteenth-century American fiction. He received his BA in 1963, from Yale, and my Ph.D. in English, from Harvard, in 1969. He taught English at Princeton from 1968 to 1975, and later moved to Williams College, where …showed first 75 words of 638 total…

…showed last 75 words of 638 total…and events is a perfectly natural thing in fiction, without needing to use precision pertaining to the details of the story. In order to set up a feel of community and culture at the time that the novel takes place, some references to real events must be engaged. I feel that Sedgwick does a beautiful job of creating a realistic fictional novel which should not be criticized for straying from the minute details of history.