Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times launched the career of one of nineteenth-century America's most influential writers and activists. Set during the first years of Puritan settlement, Lydia Maria Child's debut novel centers the experiences of women under the strain of transatlantic migration, dramatizes the religious disputes that roiled the early colonies, and mythologizes settler-Indigenous relations--especially with its depiction of a marriage between its Wampanoag title character and the fictional English colonist Mary Conant, a plotline that astonished readers in 1824.
