_Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Child._--Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) was the daughter of Judge Theodore Sedgwick and was born at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she was principal of a young ladies’ school for half a century. Her duties as a teacher did not prevent her from becoming a voluminous novelist. Her first story was “A New England Tale” (1822), which at once found favour. “Redwood” (1824) was translated into three or four Continental languages; on the title-page of the French translation, the novel was ascribed to Fenimore Cooper. Other novels which achieved great popularity for their faithful portraiture of early and contemporary New England life were “Hope Leslie, or Early Times in Massachusetts” (1827), “Clarence, a Tale of Our Own Times” (1830), “The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in America” (1835), and “Married or Single” (1857). While Miss Sedgwick never rises to the height of absorbing interest, she is rarely dull, and some of her women, if we allow for the difference in time, do not suffer in comparison with those of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Wilkins Freeman. Her descriptions of simple country life were superior to any that had hitherto appeared. Mrs. Child, born Lydia Maria Francis (1802-1880), who likewise spent her life in Massachusetts, began writing early, producing her first novel, “Hobomok,” in 1824 and her second, “The Rebels,” a year later. The former deals with Salem life in colonial times; the latter is a story of the Revolution, describing the sack of Governor Hutchinson’s house and the Boston massacre. Although they give true pictures of early Puritan customs, they are not powerful as fiction. In 1836 she essayed a more ambitious flight in “Philothea,” a romance of the days of Pericles, which, in spite of its stilted rhetoric, reveals some imaginative power and deserves mention as a pioneer attempt to interpret Greek life to America.