100 pages • 3 hours read
Hannah Webster FosterThe Coquette
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1797A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Letters 19-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Letter 19 Summary: “To Miss Lucy Freeman”
Major Sanford visits Eliza, interrupting her “ideas of sobriety and domestic solitude” (35). Sanford expresses his passionate feelings for Eliza, as well as his doubts concerning her relationship with Mr. Boyer. Though Eliza does not approve of these sentiments, her “ear was charmed with his rhetoric” (36). Sanford wishes, at least, that they could be friends. To this, Eliza says that she is already a “prisoner of friendship” to people who are “extremely refined in their notions of propriety” and that she has “no rights to receive visitants independent of them” (36).
Sanford readily admits that he has faults that some would take exception to. However, he positions them as the innocent outcome of a life of means and an affluent upbringing. He implores Eliza to judge him by her own heart, rather than her friends’ prejudices against him.
Mr. Richman enters the garden just as Major Sanford kisses Eliza’s hand. Sandford, in his characteristic way, explains away the potential impropriety of the scene, and he, Eliza, and the Richmans pass the afternoon together. After the major leaves, Mrs. Richman again warns Eliza that Sanford is attempting to seduce her.
