Fall River: An Authentic Narrative

By Catharine Read Williams

Book Overview

Catharine Williams (1787-1872) lived most of her life in Rhode Island, where she supported herself and her daughter by a productive literary career. Her most compelling work, Fall River, last published in 1833, recreates a notorious incident in the ill-fated town of Fall River, Massachusetts: the trial of a Methodist minister for the murder of a pregnant mill worker whom it was suspected he had seduced. Williams's investigative report offers a vivid contemporary view of the lives of poor "factory girls" and of clerical corruption in the industrial towns of early New England. While based in fact, the book raises themes of sexual and religious hypocrisy and exploitation that may be compared with those of novels like The Coquette, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and The Scarlet Letter. At the same time, the author's mixture of journalism, biography, fiction, and exhortation makes this "authentic narrative" an unusual challenge to traditional notions of literary form and yields fresh insights into the nature of early American women's writing.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195083598
• ISBN13: 9780195083590
• Release Date: September 1993
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Title

Thanks for the review, I will read the book. But Fall River did not exist in the 18th century. It was called Freetown.

Amazing true story from history that could be today's news.

I had the very good fortune to read this book when it was in Galleys, and it is wonderful. It's one of the earliest books written in the USA, and was written by a woman. Set in Fall River, Massachussetts in the 18th century, it tells the tale of a young girl who is seduced, impregnated, and then abandoned and defamed by an scoundrel of a minister. What was truely striking (apart from the quality of the writing), was how little things had changed in the intervening period. As I was reading the galleys, a very similar case was being tried in the same area. Well worth reading, not only for its style, but also for its content, and for its depiction of life in New England in that time.