Novel
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker
Charles Brockden Brown · 1799
Opening lines
I sit down, my friend, to comply with thy request. At length does the impetuosity of my fears, the transports of my wonder, permit me to recollect my promise and perform it.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Edgar Huntly wants to know who killed his friend Waldegrave, whose sister he is to marry. Prowling by night beneath the elm where the crime took place, he comes upon Clithero, an Irish servant on a neighbouring farm, digging a pit, asleep. Pressed with questions, the man denies this murder but confesses to a crime committed in Ireland, then vanishes into the woods of Norwalk. Huntly obstinately follows him; one day he wakes at the bottom of a dark cavern, with no memory of having descended into it, with hunger, a ferocious beast and a band of Indian warriors between him and the way back.
Context
The novel appears in Philadelphia from Hugh Maxwell, in three volumes, in 1799 and 1800, signed by “the author of Arthur Mervyn, Wieland, Ormond”, three books that had appeared since the previous year. The preface announces the programme and claims it: to leave to the European predecessors the Gothic castles and childish superstitions, and to prefer to them Indian hostility and the perils of the Western forest, which an American could not neglect. The book joins this setting to one of the strangest afflictions of the human body, sleepwalking.
Who it is for
A novel in the form of a letter to a friend, with nested narratives, whose narrator discovers only late what he did in his sleep: one must accept not knowing before he does, and put up with the coincidences.
Prizes and reception
It holds its place in the history of the American novel for having put the forest, the frontier and the Indian war where its English models put castles.
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