Autograph Quote of the final Stanza of Wordsworth's "She was a Phantom of Delight" Signed by Sedgwick

Lexox [MA], 1841. Holograph Quote of the final stanza of Wordsworth's "She was a Phantom of Delight." 6 1/4 x 7 3/4"; Single sheet; eight lines plus signature and date, written in black ink on off white paper, light age toning near the edges, neatly disbound from a journal with evidence of removal along the left edge resulting in very minor loss in four places, very good.
Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) was, with James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, one of the most popular American writers of the first half of the nineteenth century. As the daughter of a notable and moderately wealthy family, she did not turn to writing out of economic necessity, unlike some of her contemporaries. Her first novel, A NEW ENGLAND TALE, was published anonymously in 1822 and was followed by two other well-received novels, REDWOOD (1824) and HOPE LESLIE (1827). By the beginning of the 1830's, her place as the most recognizable American women author of the day was established, and she continued be a popular author for the next twenty-five years.
Sedgwick often exhibited a moralizing tone, and her work sometimes challenges commonly held social beliefs. In her novel MARRIED OR SINGLE, for example, Sedgwick sought to disprove the idea that unmarried women were useless in society and argued that women should not marry if they felt that in marriage they would lose their identity or self-respect. This quotation, the third and final stanza of Wordsworth's poem "She Was a Phantom of Delight," may have caught Sedgwick's attention because it captures the balance between the self-identity and status-quo she sought to promote through MARRIED OR SINGLE. In the final four lines, Sedgwick quotes, "A perfect Woman, nobly planned / To warn, to comfort, and command / And yet a Spirit still, and bright / With something of an angel light." In her quotation, Sedgwick has altered the last line, which in the Wordsworth original reads "With something of angelic light." BAL 17342. DAB. Wright I, 2348. Grolier Club, Emerging Voices, pp. 21-24. Baym, Nina. Women's Writing, p. 785. NAW III, pp. 256-258. American Women Writers. pp. 223-225.