The Linwoods
New York City just before the American Revolution has its agitations. Some are political, as families and friends are divided by loyalty to king, or desire for liberty. Others are personal in nature. Isabella Linwood is promised to marry an English nobleman, Jasper Meredith, but her true love, Eliot Lee, favors independence. So does Isabella’s brother, Herbert. Unfortunately the Linwood patriarch is a staunch Tory, and so is Isabella – at first.
Thus begins The Linwoods, first published in 1835. Born only thirteen years after the Revolutionary War began, Catherine Maria Sedgwick was one of her day’s most popular novelists. Her literary career began only a decade after Jane Austen’s, and the authors’ works are quite similar. Much of the volume is taken up with Austenesque love triangles. Interwoven with, then overtaking Isabella’s machinations, is the onset of the Revolution. The Linwood family is set father against son when Herbert Linwood joins the American army. The Virginia Lees are also troubled when Eliot enlists with Herbert, and by the growing mental illness of Bessie, Eliot’s sister and Isabella’s bosom friend.
Isabella herself is transformed as she embraces the cause of American liberty. I’m not wild about Victorian romances, but The Linwoods grabbed me when the Revolution comes to New York. Isabella brings Ms. Sedgwick’s personal and then-radical viewpoint to the tale: just as Americans deserved to be free, does that mean women and slaves have rights too? However, Isabella witnesses no action, so The Linwoods is not a great war story. However, it is a richly textured portrait of post-colonial American life by a woman who lived it, and an engaging novel.
