Redwood: a Tale

Redwood follows Ellen Bruce as she discovers her parentage and crafts her own identity, featuring a powerful embedded slave narrative and a remarkable mentor, Debby Lenox. The new edition includes a critical introduction, bibliography, and appendices.

Format: Hardback
Length: 432 pages
Publication date: 31 May 2021
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Redwood follows Ellen Bruce as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and identity formation, navigating the complex social currents of pious New England farmers, southern belles from South Carolina, slave-owning atheists from Virginia, and sophisticated Philadelphia socialites. Set against the backdrop of the American slave trade, the novel's embedded slave narrative serves as a powerful precursor to later anti-slavery fiction. Ellen's mentor, Debby Lenox, a remarkable and unconventional woman who stands over six feet tall and sets her own rules for respectable behavior, is both refreshing and original, even two centuries after Sedgwick's creation. This new edition includes a comprehensive critical introduction that provides historical and theoretical context, situating the novel within American social and literary history. Additionally, it features a bibliography for further research and appendices that highlight significant differences between the two nineteenth-century editions of the book.

Weight: 710g
Dimension: 162 x 241 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474467674