A New Edition of The Power of Sympathy
William Hill Brown published this novel pseudonymously in 1789. Most readers quickly recognized that it was based on a recent sex scandal in the top echelon of Boston society: rising attorney Perez Morton had impregnated his wife Susan’s sister, Fanny Apthorp.
In 1787 that affair led to a baby and parental rejection. In 1788 came a challenge to a duel from a Royal Navy officer and months of newspaper innuendo. Finally, Fanny committed suicide. Brown’s novel presented her character sympathetically—but was the book another layer of scandal?
This edition has been assembled by Prof. Jennifer Harris at the University of Waterloo and Prof. Bryan Waterman at New York University. It includes not only Brown’s The Power of Sympathy but also his play Occurrences of the Times, exploring some of the same incident as farce, and another closet drama, Sans Souci, alias, Free and Easy, digging into the sensitive spots of upper-class Boston.
Appendices reprint Fanny Apthorp’s final letters, which circulated at the time, and her sister Sarah Wentworth Morton’s poems; newspaper coverage of the case; newspaper essays on the place of women in the new republic; and letters from Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams about proper behavior for young republican gentlemen.
(Early on, people speculated that Sarah Wentworth Morton herself had written The Power of Sympathy, and that Mercy Warren had written the San Souci play. Warren was exasperated by that suggestion, Morton probably humiliated. I find it significant that both women eventually discarded their early anonymity and published under their own names, establishing how they wanted to be remembered as writers.)
The publisher of this new edition, Broadview Press, is based in Ontario. The book appears to have been published in Canada last month, but is scheduled to officially appear in the U.S. of A. this summer.
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