By Susan Martin
The MHS is pleased to announce that the collection guide to the Catharine Maria Sedgwick papers is now online. This is a very heavily used collection, and we hope the new guide will encourage even more scholarship about this interesting woman, her work, and her family.
Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) was a member of the illustrious Sedgwick family of western Massachusetts and a prolific antebellum author. She wrote many novels and short stories between 1822 and 1862, including A New-England Tale, Redwood, Hope Leslie, Clarence, The Linwoods, and Married or Single? Very popular in her time and praised by many of her contemporaries, including William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Martineau, and Edgar Allan Poe, Sedgwick was largely overlooked by scholars in the century following her death, and most of her books were out of print for decades. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in her life and work.
The Catharine Maria Sedgwick papers at the MHS actually consist of three separate sub-collections of papers acquired in installments between 1954 and 1965. In 1981, the three sub-collections were microfilmed together onto 18 reels of film, but the original three-part arrangement was retained, and each part was described and indexed separately. The paper guide ran to over 120 pages, and because of the overlap of subjects, dates, and correspondents across all three parts, using the collection could be a challenge, to say the least.
Now, thanks to a grant from the Sedgwick Family Charitable Trust, the new and improved Catharine Maria Sedgwick guide is available to researchers both on and offsite. Since we didn’t have the option of physically rearranging the collection itself, we concentrated on improving access to it by substantially revising the old paper guide. Among other changes, we combined the three indexes into one, enhanced descriptions of the volumes, and added a biographical sketch, timeline, and links to related collections at the MHS.
Please take a look at the new Catharine Maria Sedgwick collection guide.