CHAPTER VI
In many visits to Hartford, which beautiful city was the joy of my girlhood, I met Mrs. Sigourney—the sweet, calm Mrs. Barbauld of our early verse, and a dear woman. She was Hartford's first littérateur, to be followed by such eminent stars as Mrs. Stowe, Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain, and I do not know how many more. Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Anne S. Stephens, and Mrs. Sigourney were the most read and talked of of our authoresses of that day. Mrs. Stephens's Fashion and Famine, in which was pictured Mrs. Coventry Waddell's curious house on the top of Murray Hill, surrounded by unoccupied lots (and which bore the strong and useful suggestion for the subsequent helping of the poor so admirably carried out by Miss Schuyler), was the novel of the day. Miss Sedgwick was a most distinguished woman. Her novel Hope Leslie had been the first New England success, and she was the idol of the most agreeable and successful of all the great brother-and-sister families, the Lenox Sedgwicks, who were to be followed by the Dwights and the Fields, all Berkshire County people of that day. Mrs. Robert Sedgwick was one of the entertainers of the literary and fashionable sets as they commingled when I first
