The suspense surrounding the parentage of the heroine, the intrigue supplied by the treachery of male and female villains, the freshness of the indomitable Aunt Debby, the glimpse into the eccentric sect of the Shakers, and the drama of multiple courtships: these rewards explain why nineteenth-century readers, both in America and in Europe, avidly invested money, time and emotion in Redwood: A Tale (1824). Featuring almost as many subplots, backstories and embedded texts as it has characters, Sedgwick's second novel was nearly three times the length of her fi rst, and it was longer and more complex than most, if not all, previous American novels.

With her fi rst novel, A New-England Tale (1822), Sedgwick had launched not only her own career as a novelist but also a whole genre of ‘woman's fi ction’ that tells the stories of heroines ‘who, beset with hardships, [fi nd] within [themselves] the qualities of intelligence, will, resourcefulness, and courage suffi cient to overcome them’ (Baym 22). Redwood further develops that new genre, to be sure, but it also incorporates elements of the novel of seduction, the genre that had dominated fi ction by American women writers in the decades immediately following the revolution.