Alonzo and Melissa

Courtship gives way to captivity in this early American gothic, serialized in 1804 in the Poughkeepsie paper Isaac Mitchell edited and expanded into a book in 1811. Alonzo, a Yale graduate of romantic temper, wins Melissa’s affection during the Revolution, then his merchant father is ruined and hers presses her toward the wealthy Beauman. Melissa holds out, so her family shuts her in a battlemented stone house near Long Island Sound, where locked gates and night noises supply the terror. Alonzo, told she has died, goes to sea, is captured by the British, escapes an English prison and reaches Paris, where Benjamin Franklin hears his story and quietly reorders his fortunes. Reliance on providence is the stated moral, and the plot obliges. Most of its many nineteenth century printings carried another man’s name.