In Rowson's "Charlotte Temple" a teenage girl runs away from the home in England in the company of a dashing young soldier. Abandoned in the new world, she sinks into dreadful poverty, and then dies, bearing her illegitimate daughter among strangers. Rowson doesn't condemn Charlotte for her promiscuity; rather, she blames a social system that leaves her so innocent, an easy prey to unscrupulous men. The portrayal of Charlotte is masterful. The girl's naive and ingenuous character is rendered convincingly. Rowson details the progress of her seduction with sympathy and keen psychological insights into the working of her mind.

The writer also devoted considerable time in this short novel to describing other characters, Charlotte's parents. Lucy Eldridge Temple and her father had been driven to a debtor's prison by the machinations of an unscrupulous man who had designs on Lucy. Her refusal under intense pressure, to submit to the kind of arrangement Charlotte has with Montraville brings disaster to the household but the Eldriges and Temple never doubt that she has done the right thing. It is thus doubly poignant that Lucy's daughter Charlotte should yield as she does. It is ironic and also understandable that such an idealistic couple could produce a child as dangerously naive as Charlotte.

Montraville plays an evil role in the story. Attracted to Charlotte and unable to resist seducing her, though he knows that her lack of fortune will make marriage impossible; he abandons her because he believes his deceitful friend Belcour. That friend Belcour had placed Charlotte in a compromising position in order to alienate her from Montraville. Also, Montraville cannot resist the charm of Julia Franklin, his new love. Though Montraville seduced Charlotte, he suffers intense pangs of conscience, for what he has done and early dies. By making Montraville a sympathetic human being instead of a stock - figure of evil, Rowson shows that such things can really happen, even to the most well-meaning people. Melodramatic situations described by Rawson are a protest against the female condition and at the same time the source of her power, concern for freedom.

While "Charlotte Temple" has a tendency to view women as weak, helpless and in need of male protection - its heroine is passive and dies after she is abandoned by the men in her life - the novel has also been read as a protest against women's position in society. Rowson's own life was characterized by a resourcefulness that testifies to the possibilities for women's independent thought and action in eighteenth-century America.

The plot is a good deal more complicated in Hannah Foster's "The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton". The novel was an immediate success upon its publication in 1797 and along with Susanna Rowson's "Charlotte Temple" became the bestseller of the 1790s. Using the epistolary genre, Hannah Foster based her novel of temptation and seduction on the tragedy of a woman from Hartford, named Elizabeth Whitman, whose sad story was well known by the time Foster published her novel. Both Eliza and Elizabeth were the daughters of respected ministers and were known among their friends for their wit, intelligence, charm.

The main character, Eliza Wharton, is well educated and we learn near the end of the book in her thirties when she "falls". Yet, even in this instance, Foster critiques both the character and the society in which she lives. Under particular attack is the double sexual standard by which a woman's sexual transgressions are punishable by abandonment and even death, whereas a man's are often overlooked as trivial offenses.

"The Coquette " raises the question of freedom, its meaning and its limits, in a new land newly dedicated to births of new freedoms. Many critics see Eliza Wharton as a rebel who seeks a freedom not typically allotted to her sex, and thus she consistently rejects the advice of friends who encourage her to settle into the "modest freedom" of marriage. Cathy N. Davidson in "Revolution and the Word: Rise of the Novel in America" speaks about the "The Coquette" as much more than simply an allegory of seduction, she considered it as less a story of the wages of sin than a study of the wages of marriage [Davidson, 1986].

In the novel Hannah Foster follows the epistolary sentimental tradition. The story of Eliza Wharton's temptation, seduction, distress, and death is revealed in letters between friends. The subjects touched upon in letters range from friendship and marriage to economic security and social status. According to Cathy N. Davidson, the letters between friends expose