“The Literary Mysteries of Sally Sayward Wood: America’s First Female Gothic Novelist” with Tom Hillard

Wednesday, March 1, 2023, 4:30 p.m. MST
Webinar via Zoom (free, registration required)

The Old York Historical Society of Maine presents “The Literary Mysteries of Sally Sayward Wood: America’s First Female Gothic Novelist” as a webinar with Boise State’s Tom Hillard.

Hillard will present an overview of Sally Wood’s life, exploring some of the extraordinary circumstances of her fiction-writing career—and especially her first novel, “Julia and the Illuminated Baron” (1800). He places her career and writing in the contexts of the literary and publishing worlds of the post-Revolutionary War era.

Sally Wood (1759–1855), Maine’s first novelist, published four novels between 1800 and 1804 which places her among the first and most prolific fiction writers of the early national period in the United States. Yet too few people, even among scholars of literature and history, are aware of her work.

Register for “The Literary Mysteries of Sally Sayward Wood: America’s First Female Gothic Novelist.”