He was later elected Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and in 1802, was appointed a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

The integrity and pride that Freeman possessed regarding her own personal intelligence and understanding of the world can be reflected in Sedgwick's admiration of the woman.

[1] In 1825, Sedgwick published The Travellers, a narrative of a journey made by two very young persons, a brother and sister, with their parents, to Niagara Falls and the northern lakes.

Her earlier works stood alone, and Hope Leslie, especially, became firmly associated in the public mind with the rising form of a native literature.

Similar to the manner in which Sedgwick represented a progressive attitude toward the supposed duties of women during the time period, Philip Gura highlights her addition of minority groups as significant characters and her commitment to questioning the history of the nation that has been told exclusively by white men.

[11] A little later, the Brothers Harper conceived the idea of publishing a collection of tales by several well-known authors, and applied to Sedgwick to become one of the contributors.

Sedgwick's contribution was a tale of the times of Charlemagne, titled "Le Bossu", in which she skillfully availed herself of the elements of the picturesque to be found in the customs of that warlike age, and the court of that monarch.

The Boy of Mount Rhigi, published in 1848, was one of a series of tales projected for the purpose of diffusing sentiments of goodness among the young.

The titles of some of her other small volumes are Facts and Fancies, Beatitudes and Pleasant Sundays, Morals of Manners, Wilton Harvey, Home, Louisa and her Cousins, and Lessons without Books.

[14] In later years, both the brothers who resided in New York City were dead; and her time was divided among her friends in the neighborhood of Boston and those in her native Berkshire.

Interest in Sedgwick's works and an appreciation of her contribution to American literature has been stimulated by the late 20th century's feminist movement.

Beginning in the 1960s, feminist scholars began to re-evaluate women's contributions to literature and other arts and created new frames of reference for considering their work.

In addition, the advent of low-cost electronic reproductions, which became available at the end of the 20th century, made Sedgwick and other nineteenth-century authors' work more accessible for study and pleasure.

Her forehead is an unusually fine one nose of a slightly Roman curve; eyes dark and piercing; mouth well-formed and remarkably pleasant in its expression.

The portrait in Graham's Magazine is by no means a likeness, and, although the hair is represented as curled, (Miss Sedgwick at present wears a cap—at least, most usually,) gives her the air of being much older than she is.Sedgwick's first publication was The New England Tale.

The author informs us in the preface, that the story was commenced as a religious tract, and that it gradually grew in her hands, beyond the proper limits of such a work.

[1] Sedgwick's third novel, Hope Leslie (1827),[20] recounted a dramatic conflict among the British Empire, colonists and Native Americans.

Sedgwick portrays Leslie as living in a hostile world, where, as a woman, she creates a holistic public role that is not separate from the private sphere.

They see the figure of Magawisca as a double for Hope Leslie, and note that the author did research on Mohawk customs and presents their religion sympathetically.

Because Sedgwick portrays Faith Leslie's marriage to an Indian and refusal to rejoin the Puritan community, they see her as more open to American-Native American relations than was James Fenimore Cooper, for instance, whose novel Last of the Mohicans (1826) was published the year before.

A review in the New York Evening Post (14 June 1830) praises the presentations of American domestic life as being "managed with great liveliness and ingenuity, and constitute one of the most attractive parts of the book".

Sedgwick uses a cosmopolitan framework to shed light on American character and national identity in the early republic by exploring America's relationship with Britain and France.

The local traditions, scenery, manners, and costume, being thus entirely familiar, she has had greater freedom in the exercise of the creative faculty, on which, after all, real eminence in the art mainly depends.

Her characters are conceived with distinctness, and are minutely individual and consistent, while her plot always shows a mind fertile in resources and a happy adaptation of means to ends.

Animated by a cheerful philosophy, and anxious to pour its sunshine into every place where there is lurking care or suffering, she selects for illustration the scenes of everyday experience, paints them with exact fidelity, and seeks to diffuse over the mind a delicious serenity, and in the heart kind feelings and sympathies, and wise ambition and steady hope.