Two volumes, 8vo, (185 x 113 mm). [viii], 138, [2], [ii], [143]–275, [1] pp. Period-style half sheep over marbled boards. An untrimmed, unsophisticated copy, light dampstaining and soiling.

Born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart (1796–1867) was Canada’s first native-born novelist. After the trauma of her father’s murder in 1815, she moved to Kingston, Ontario. She worked as a teacher and completed her first novel, St Ursula’s Convent, or, The Nun of Canada, which she began when she was just 17. It was published anonymously in Ontario in 1824 and is the first novel published by a native born Canadian. A commercial success upon publication, it “is considered a landmark in early Canadian literature, and provides an example of the fiction that appealed to the reading public in early nineteenth-century Canada” (ODNB).

Her second novel, Tonnewonte, or, The adopted son of America, is set in France and upper-state New York in the autumn of 1796. It “patriotically demonstrates the many advantages of New World democracy compared with the class divisions of France during the Napoleonic period and, like St Ursula’s Convent, incorporates descriptions of North American history and landscape” (ibid). This time Hart opted for a pseudonym and, tellingly, chose “An American.” Hart returned to Fredericton in 1831 with her husband and spent the rest of her life there.

She contributed fiction to the local paper and completed, but did not publish a third novel, Edith, or, The Doom. The book is reasonably well-held in institutional libraries but is rare in the trade with just a handful of copies appearing at auction.

A second edition was published in Albany the same year.

Sabin, 96169; Severance, F.H., Studies of the Niagara Frontier (NY, 1911) p.90.