Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat

Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat was a nineteenth-century American novelist, poet, essayist, translator, and advocate for women’s education. Born in Portland, Maine, during 1823, she traveled widely and built a literary career alongside civic and philanthropic work. “Ethel’s Love-Life” and Other Writings brings her mid-nineteenth-century novel together with poems and essays in a modern scholarly edition edited by Christopher Looby and published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2020. The novel is especially notable for its candid treatment of intense attachments between women and for the range of intellectual and emotional life it gives its narrator. Sweat also wrote Highways of Travel; or, A Summer in Europe and contributed to periodicals. Her papers preserve correspondence, manuscripts, and records of cultural organizations. “Ethel’s Love-Life” and Other Writings restores a once-neglected New England writer whose work crossed fiction, travel writing, criticism, and reform-minded public life.