Charlotte Temple

Charlotte Temple follows a fifteen-year-old English schoolgirl talked into eloping to America by a young officer, Montraville, and the scheming French teacher La Rue who arranges it for her own ends. Abandoned pregnant in New York when Montraville is pressured into a wealthier match, Charlotte is left to the mercy of a city and a class of people with no reason to help her, in a novel written, its narrator insists more than once, as a warning rather than an entertainment.

Susanna Rowson published Charlotte Temple in England in 1791 and, after she moved to the United States, in an American edition in 1794 that became one of the new country's first bestsellers — it stayed continuously in print for over a century and inspired real visitors to a supposed Trinity Churchyard grave for a woman who never existed. Rowson later ran a well-known Boston girls' academy.

Bibliomancer publishes the 1794 American text exactly as Susanna Rowson wrote it.