Lucinda; or, The Mountain Mourner: Being Recent Facts, in a Series of Letters from Mrs. Manvill of the State of New-York, to Her Sister in Pennsylvania.

xi, [4], 16-168 pp. This edition includes an appendix comprising five chapters. In 1807, a small rural New York press published the first edition of P. D. Manville's Lucinda; or the Mountain Mourner. Over the next five decades no fewer than ten printings of the novel appeared in three different states. In the book, the eponymous heroine is one of seven children left to the ailing and poverty-stricken widower Adrian Manvill. Although it is a memoir, Lucinda reads like a sentimental epistolary novel, where the heroine is seduced, abandoned, and then dies in isolation shortly after her illegitimate child is born.