Euphemia — Charlotte Lennox

Description

Euphemia follows a young Englishwoman who leaves London for a British army posting in colonial New York, writing home to her lifelong friend Maria through years of frontier hardship, captivity, family scheming, and the slow unraveling of two marriages made for the wrong reasons. It was Charlotte Lennox's final novel, published in 1790 when she was already the celebrated author of The Female Quixote — but unlike that earlier book, which built its comedy from a heroine's romantic delusions, Euphemia is a quieter, more somber story, closer in tone to Lennox's own difficult life and her firsthand memories of growing up in colonial America.

The novel has never had a modern trade edition. The only copies available today are expensive facsimile reprints of the original 1790 scan — no commercial ebook exists. It survives mainly as a subject for specialists in eighteenth-century and early transatlantic fiction, overshadowed for two centuries by its far more famous predecessor.

Author & Genre

Charlotte Lennox (c. 1729–1804) — Epistolary Novel, 18th Century Fiction, Women's Writing

"Heaven forgive me, but I could not help hating them a little for the part they had in making this will: though to be sure they were no ways to blame."