This image released by Penguin Classics shows the title page of the first edition of the 1789 book “The Power of Sympathy” by William Hill Brown. In the winter of 1789, around the time George Washington was elected the country’s first president, a Boston-based printer quietly launched another American institution.
Outside of Boston society, though, few would have known or cared whether “The Power of Sympathy” marked any kind of literary milestone. Like many other early American writers, fiction and nonfiction, Brown tied the behavior of women to the fate of the larger society. The novel’s correspondents fret about the destabilizing “power of “pleasure” and how female envy “inundates the land with a flood of scandal.” Virtue is likened to a “mighty river” that “fertilizes the country through which it passes and increases in magnitude and force until it empty itself into the ocean.
Brown was likely more interested in shaping minds than in literary glory. “The Great American Novel” is a favorite catchphrase but wasn’t coined until the 1860s. During Brown’s lifetime, novels were a relatively crude art form and were valued mostly for satire, light entertainment or moral instruction. Few writers identified themselves as “novelists”: Brown was known as a poet, and essayist and the composer of an opera.
Brown’s novel was unexamined for so long that only in the late 19th century did the public even discover he had written it. Many had credited the Boston poet Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, whose family had endured a scandal similar to the one in “The Power of Sympathy.”