In 1790 appeared a novel, “Charlotte Temple,” a story of love, betrayal, and desertion, by =Mrs. Susanna Haswell Rowson=, a book of which more than a hundred editions are known. With the beginning of the 19th Century the number of American authoresses increased rapidly. =Catharine= and =Susan Sedgwick= wrote their “New England Tales,” which were received with such favor, that Catharine in 1824 published a novel in two volumes, entitled “Redwood,” a work which met with great success, was republished in England, and translated into French and Italian. It was followed by a large number of other novels, which were greatly appreciated for their purity of language and grace of style. Somewhat later =Lydia Maria Child= developed as one of the first and foremost progressive writers. Having commenced her literary life with “Hobomok, a Story of the Pilgrims,” she later on devoted herself to the cause of woman and the abolition of slavery. She wrote a “History of Woman,” which was followed in 1833 by a strong “Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans,” the first anti-slavery work ever printed in book form in America. In 1841 she moved to New York and assisted her husband in editing “The National Anti-Slavery Standard.” As is very generally known, her contemporary, =Harriet Beecher Stowe=, too, was interested in the question of abolition. In 1850 she wrote for the “National Era,” an anti-slavery paper, a serial entitled “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” When this novel was republished in book form it met with tremendous success. In the United States between 300,000 and 400,000 copies were sold within three years, and the printing press had to run day in and out to meet the demand. In Europe the book was devoured with the same deep interest. There are thirty-five different editions in English, and translations in at least twenty different languages. As the novel was also dramatized in various forms, it became a great factor in the abolishment of slavery. Of the later stories by Mrs. Stowe “The Minister’s Wooing,” a tale of New England life in the latter part of the 18th Century, has been pronounced to be her best. But her reputation, while it lasts, will rest chiefly upon “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” =Sarah Margaret Fuller= too belongs to those authors who espoused the cause of woman’s rights. In “The Dial,” a little quarterly journal, the organ of the transcendentalists and of the famous community at Brook Farm, she first published “The Great Lawsuit.” It formed the nucleus of a larger volume entitled “Woman in the Nineteenth Century.” Far in advance of the ideas of her times, it is with its noble sentiments and valuable hints a spirited plea for the rights of the female sex.