Though it garnered little critical notice in its day, it influenced works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Walt Whitman.

Following a darkly poetic narrative, the story centers on historical figure George Burroughs and fictional witch hysteria victim, Rachel Dyer.

Originally written in 1825 as a short story for Blackwood's Magazine, Rachel Dyer was expanded after Neal returned to his hometown, Portland, Maine, from a sojourn in London.

He experimented with speech patterns, dialogue, and transcriptions of Yankee dialect, crafting a style for the novel that Neal hoped would come to characterize American literature.

The narrator then introduces the peculiarities of colonial court proceedings and early Puritan leaders, Governor William Phips and Reverend Matthew Paris (based on Samuel Parris).

While imprisoned and awaiting trial, Burroughs fails to convince the Dyer sisters to issue false confessions in the hope of delaying their own executions until the hysteria passes.

The final chapter is followed by an appendix labeled "Historical Facts", in which Neal cites connections between first-hand accounts of the witch trials and the circumstances of the story.

"They were ministers of the gospel, who ... pursued their brethren to death, scourged, fined, imprisoned, banished, mutilated, and where nothing else would do, hung up their bodies between heaven and earth for the good of their souls".

[9] According to author Donald Sears, juxtaposing crown colonies of the 1690s with republican America of the 1820s highlights the relative value placed on human life in each era.

[10] Historian Philip Gould and literature scholars David J. Carlson and Fritz Fleischmann feel the juxtaposition critiques early nineteenth-century American reliance on tradition and hierarchy.

[12] Neal was at the forefront of the early American literary nationalist movement,[13] which he implies with this novel is deeply connected to the creation of a new legal system that abandons common law through codification.

[15] Neal commented on this search by making the greatest opponent to common law in his novel, George Burroughs, of mixed English and Indigenous American ancestry and upbringing.

[17] As a Gothic novel,[18] Rachel Dyer uses gloomy narration, associates dark spaces with immorality, depicts New England forests as the devil's domain, and portrays superstition as the product of rural isolation.

[21] After reading Rachel Dyer, John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were inspired to include witchcraft in their poetry and prose.

[23] He defends Metacomet's legacy from King Philip's War[10] and characterizes the witch hysteria as supernatural retribution for the Puritans' mistreatment of their Indigenous neighbors.

[25] Neal's choice to give Burroughs a multiracial identity and have him navigate between white and Indigenous worlds is interpreted as a challenge to the concepts of national unity and imperialism.

[27] Neal clearly states in the preface that one of his intentions in crafting the novel's title character was to counteract the dominant literary theme that links positive personal attributes with physical beauty, saying "that a towering intellect may inhabit a miserable body".

[29] Despite her physical deformities,[10] Rachel Dyer demonstrates high morals and commitment to female solidarity in spite of the jealousy she felt at other women's attraction to Burroughs.

[41] The resulting novel Rachel Dyer is longer, but not substantially different from the original tale, which Neal eventually published as "New-England Witchcraft" in five issues of the New-York Mirror in 1839.

[47] Like his magazine The Yankee,[48] which also launched in 1828, Rachel Dyer may have been part of Neal's campaign to win back the respect of his hometown, according to author Donald Sears.

[54] This is particularly the case in courtroom scenes, which make up two-thirds of the book's length,[54] and that provide a vehicle for demonstrating style elements that Neal felt should come to define American literature.

[58] Like many of his other novels, Neal used Rachel Dyer to experiment with phonetic transcriptions of Yankee dialect, which is assigned to minor characters like Robert Eveleth, the court bailiff, and frontier townsfolk at the Battle of Fort Loyal.

[70] He blamed them for helping advance Jacksonianism on the rise at the time: manifest destiny, empire building, Indian removal, consolidation of federal power, racialized citizenship, and the Cult of Domesticity.

[64] However, the essay also used the relatively uncontroversial concept of literary nationalism to advance the more controversial push among radical American lawyers to abandon English Common law.

[83] A British critic, while reviewing Neal's next novel Authorship in 1831, offered brief and lukewarm praise of the earlier work by referring to Burroughs as "the wild preacher of the woods ... a personage worthy of the dramatic era of Elizabeth".

"[87] The other Yankee review was written by a friend, who anticipated the prevailing sentiment amongst modern scholars that Rachel Dyer represents Neal's best effort to date to control his own expansive proclivities.

"[91] Contemporary scholars of John Neal's novels widely consider Rachel Dyer to be his most successful,[92] though it is as obscure to the modern reader as his other books.

[93] Biographer Donald A. Sears specifically points to the novel's depth of characterization, skilled phonetic transcription of regional accents, and experiments with dialogue.

[95] Biographer Benjamin Lease feels that, while Hawthorne and Herman Melville used the same themes years later to produce better novels, "in 1828, Rachel Dyer stands alone".

[103] Whereas most scholars posit that Neal subdued his natural expansive tendencies in order to write Rachel Dyer, Maya Merlob argues that his more erratic works represent as much an intentionally chosen model as this novel does.