Because of her indecision and her apparent preference for the libertine Sanford, Boyer eventually gives up on her, deciding that she will not make a suitable wife.

They have a hidden affair for some time until, overcome by guilt and unwilling to face her family and friends, Eliza arranges to escape from her home.

[2] Written in epistolary form, this novel allows the reader to directly engage with the events central to the plot by entering the minds of the characters.

[3] Her death notices, published in a variety of New England newspapers in 1788, quickly provoked moral lectures for young women.

Foster responded with The Coquette, which offered a more sympathetic portrayal of Whitman and the restrictions placed on middle-class women in early American society.

With the growing popularity of Foster's novel, the true Elizabeth Whitman and the fictional Eliza Wharton became melded into one and are barely differentiable by most readers today.

[1] Cathy N. Davidson argues that The Coquette is not merely a novel about the evils of sin and seduction, but rather "a remarkably detailed assessment of the marital possibilities facing late-eighteenth-century women of the middle or upper-middle classes.

"[11] Countering Davidson and Harris, Thomas Joudrey has argued that the novel fortifies obedience to a patriarchal conception of marriage.

In its sustained denigration of fancy and passion, The Coquette "deprives the imagined readers not merely of actualized resistance but also of the very mental capacities that perceive injury and formulate alternatives to their oppression.

In Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature, Ivy Schweitzer discusses the "affective failures" of Eliza Wharton's female friends[13] and argues that while Eliza can be understood as "the champion of an inclusive, even feminist 'civic republicanism,'" her friends belong to "the female 'chorus' [that] presages the more rigid separation of the sexes and women's exile from the social to the domestic sphere ushered in by liberalism.

"[14] Claire C. Pettengill reads female friendship within The Coquette in terms of sisterhood, which she argues "[involved] a kind of support network that helped a woman establish her identity in opposition to both social and parental authority in an era where both were increasingly challenged.

"[16] That is, even though Eliza discusses her life with her friends, they do not fully reciprocate; instead, they respond primarily by criticizing her actions and warning her against further wrongdoing.

[16] Pettengill ultimately arrives at the conclusion that "The novel's bifurcated view of sisterhood, then, reveals some of the ways in which the new nation's uneasiness over changing economic and social relations, in particular the tension between individual and group interests, spelled itself out in terms of the function of women.

"[18] Additionally, C. Leiren Mower makes the case that Eliza "reworks Lockean theories of labor and ownership as a means of authorizing proprietary control over her body's commerce in the social marketplace.

Instead of accepting her social and legal status as another's personal property, Eliza publicly performs her dissent as visible evidence of the legitimacy of her proprietary claims.

A poem titled The Coquette, borrowing heavily from Webster Foster's work, was printed in 1798 in The Humming Bird, the first known magazine published by a woman editor in the United States.