Born in Salisbury, Massachusetts, on September 10, 1758, Hannah Webster received the genteel education prescribed for young girls of that day. In April 1785 she married the Reverend John Foster, a Unitarian minister, with whom she settled in Brighton, Massachusetts. In 1797, signing herself merely ╥A Lady of Massachusetts,╙ she published The Coquette; or The History of Eliza Wharton, a highly sentimental novel that enjoyed much success. Advertised as ╥founded on fact,╙ The Coquette was loosely based on an actual case of seduction, elopement, and tragic death. It both followed and in some particulars, notably characterization, transcended the imperatives of the formula for such fiction, in which to stray from the path of virtue was to invite inevitable and terrible retribution. The book exhibited also in its epistolary form the marked influence of Samuel Richardson╒s Clarissa Harlowe. Sales of the book warranted 13 editions during the author╒s lifetime and kept it in print for decades after her death, and in an 1866 edition her name was placed on the title page for the first time. Her second book, The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Preceptress to her Pupils, 1798, was a failure. Little is known of Hannah Foster╒s life outside her books. She died in Montreal on April 17, 1840.
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