Hannah Foster

Few local residents realize that number 10 Academy Hill Road, just outside of Brighton Center, is a major American literary landmark. Time has not been kind to this ancient edifice, which once served as the parsonage of Brighton's First Parish Church. Its facade was long ago converted into a store front.

What makes this building so important? Here, in 1797, Hannah Webster Foster, the wife of Brighton's only minister, the Reverend John Foster, wrote a pioneer American novel entitled, The Coquette, or the History of Eliza Wharton.

Not only was The Coquette the first novel ever written by a native-born American woman, but its publication caused a literary sensation.

The Coquette was a thinly-veiled account (employing fictitious names) of the seduction, betrayal, and eventual death in childbirth of Elizabeth Whitman, daughter of Reverend Elnathon Whitman of Hartford, Connecticut (a distant relative of Reverend John Foster). Her seducer, it was generally believed, was Pierpont Edwards, son of the great evangelical minister Jonathan Edwards, the preacher who spearheaded the religious movement known as the Great Awakening. The high reputation of Pierpont's father, of course, added spice to the Whitman scandal. Then, as now, scandal exerted a powerful attraction upon the reading public.

The Coquette was said to have been, next to the Bible, the most popular reading material of early 19th century New England. A recent commentator tells us that it was "one of the two best-selling American novels of the 18th century." By 1840, it had appeared in some thirty editions!

But The Coquette was much more than a potboiler. The work also had genuine literary merit. The editor of its 1970 edition, William Osborne, noted that "Mrs. Foster [gave] early American fiction an interest it did not have before: a candid discussion of a social problem and a sensible depiction of character." Cathy N. Davidson, Professor of English at Michigan State College, in her introduction to the most recent (1986) edition of The Coquette, added that it realistically examined the "perameters of female powerlessness and female constraint" in late 18th century American society.

Recognizing the importance of the old Brighton Parsonage to the literary history of Boston and the nation, I recently petitioned the Bostonian Society's Historical Markers Program asking that an appropriate plaque be placed on the site. I am pleased to report that the request has been approved, and that the Bostonian Society will shortly contact the owner for permission to install an historical marker on 10 Academy hill Road.

Hannah Webster Foster was born in Salisbury, Massachusetts in 1758, the daughter of Grant Webster, a well-to-do Boston merchant and moneylender, and of Hannah Wainwright Webster. After her mother's death in 1762, Hannah was sent to a boarding school for several years, an experience that formed the basis of her second novel, also written at 10 Academy Hill Road, The Boarding School, or, Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Students, published in 1799.

The great wealth of the Webster family is evidenced by an advertisement her father ran in "The Massachusetts Sun" in 1771, offering a wide assortment of goods and property for sale, including produce, ship supplies, several Boston tenements, a country estate ten miles outside of the city, and a Suffolk County lead mine. Hannah's brother, Redford Webster, who made his own fortune in the drug business, resided in the Clarke-Frankland mansion in Boston's fashionable North Square. Only in the next generation did the Webster family fall upon hard times, when Redford's son, Dr. John Webster, was judged guilty of the bludgeoning death of Dr. John Parknam, and was sentenced to be hanged in the most famous Boston murder trial of the 19th century.

Hannah Webster married Reverend John Foster of Brighton in 1785, a year after that recent Dartmouth College graduate assumed the pulpit of Brighton's First Parish Church.

Reverend and Mrs. Foster occupied three Brighton residences during their forty-four year marriage. Their first home was the old Ebenezer Smith House at 15-17 Peaceable Street, a structure that still stands, and is the oldest building in the Brighton Center area. Originally the home of major Brighton landowner Ebenezer Smith, it had also belonged to the Winships from 1775 to 1780, at the time of their founding of the Brighton Cattle Market.

About 1790 the Foster's moved to the newly constructed and much larger First Church Parsonage at 10 Academy Hill Road, where Hannah was to write her two novels in the 1797 to 1799 period. With the publication of her second novel, Hannah's career as a writer came to an abrupt end. Her time thereafter was devoted to raising a large family and attending to the myriad responsibilities of a minister's wife.

Then, about 1810, John and Hannah built an elaborate mansion on Foster Street (then called Seaver Lane), probably with money inherited from her father. This building stood on the site of the Franciscan Sister's of Africa Convent, a location a contemporary described as "overlooking scenery as charming as in any part of Brighton."

The Foster Mansion has been described as "a very large square house which faced to the south, to the front porch of which was added an ell used as a library and a reception room. The hilly land east of the house was terraced and the daughters became very industrious in keeping the grounds well stocked with flowering shrubs and plants." Another source noted that it was "just the place for a minister to write a sermon and romantic enough for a wife to write a novel." While the bulk of the Foster Mansion was taken down in 1848 to make way for another structure, a portion of the old house still stands across the road at 181 Foster Street.

Hannah and John Foster had six children, three sons and three daughters. Two of the daughters, Hannah Foster Cheney and Elizabeth Foster Cushing, followed in their mother's footsteps and became writers.

Prior to 1827, Reverend Foster presided over the only church in Brighton. As wife of the town's sole minister, and the daughter of an important Boston merchant, Hannah became the acknowledged social leader of the community. In her reminiscences of the town in the 1820s, Mary Ann Kingsley Merwin recounted the anxiety her parents felt at the prospect of a visit by Reverend and Mrs. Foster to their home on Washington Street in Brighton Center. The Kingsleys were a week in preparing for this signal event. Some sources contend that the aristocratic Foster's had an exclusive attitude that served to offend many of the town' residents.

Whatever the case, it seems clear that Hannah Foster took her social responsibilities quite seriously. A history of the Massachusetts Federation of Women's Clubs credits her with having founded in the early 1800s, among the female member's of her husband's Brighton Church, the first women's club in Massachusetts.

In 1827, a schism occurred in Brighton's First Parish Church, when a breakaway group established the Brighton Evangelical Congregational Society. A short time later Reverend Foster, who was in his sixties and in failing health, relinquished his pulpit. After his death in 1829, Hannah moved to Montreal to live with her daughter, Elizabeth Foster Cushing, the wife of Dr. Frederick Cushing, who was the physician at the Emigrant Hospital there. Hannah Webster Foster, Brighton's pioneer novelist, died in Montreal in 1840, at age 81.