Lucinda; or, The Mountain Mourner

In 1807, a small rural New York press published the first edition of P. D. Manville’s Lucinda; or the Mountain Mourner. Over the next five decades now fewer than ten printings of the novel appeared in three different states. In the book, the eponymous heroine is one of seven children left to the ailing and poverty-stricken widower Adrian Manvill. Although it is a memoir, Lucinda reads like a sentimental epistolary novel, where the heroine is seduced, abandoned, and then dies in isolation shortly