For much of its history, the seduction novel was absent from the origin tale literary historians have spun about American literature. While Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1794) and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797) included both the love and the death that critics like Leslie Fiedler insisted were the building blocks of the American literary tradition, these novels had the details all wrong. Following a European template, these texts told a story of dependence, deceit, and downfall – hardly the stuff of national origin myths. But as Cathy Davidson and others have demonstrated, these were precisely the stories that resonated among early Americans. Seduction was everywhere in early America – not only in novels, but in magazines, newspaper accounts, and in the privileged realms of privately circulating letters and manuscripts. According to Mildred Doyle, seduction outstripped all other topics in the periodical literature of the period. The two novels I shall discuss in this chapter certainly tapped into the era' general fascination with the subject. Matthew Carey, Charlotte Temple's American publisher, estimated that the book had sold well over 50,000 copies by 1812. Foster's The Coquette went through at least ten editions between 1797 and 1866.

Once these novels were rediscovered in the twentieth century as part of a widespread recovery effort by feminist scholars, two major critical narratives emerged about them. The first focused on the seduced woman as a symbol for a young and vulnerable nation. As Jan Lewis writes, the seduction novel heroine's “attempt to navigate between the eighteenth-century Scylla of overweening power and its Charybdis of seductive liberty was the nation's plot as well.”