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Analysis of Susanna Haswell Rowson’s Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 9, 2026

Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth was America’s first best-seller, with more than 200 editions published from the 18th through the 20th centuries. This sensational tale of a poor girl seduced and abandoned touched thousands of readers in the early republic but can often be difficult for modern readers to appreciate, given its heavily didactic message cloaked in melodramatic scenes that brought so many to tears for more than a century. For a 21st-century public that considers melancholia something to be diagnosed and treated rather than a romantic sentiment to be indulged, as 18th-century readers believed, examining Charlotte Temple’s highly emotional language can become tedious.

Critics have long noted the novel’s artistic defects and are often at a loss to try to explain its popularity. Early critics said little of it at all beyond acknowledging its fame and noting Charlotte Temple’s aesthetic failures. Yet in her introduction to Charlotte Temple, Susanna Rowson makes clear her purposes are educational, not aesthetic: “If the following tale should save one hapless fair from the error which ruined poor Charlotte, or rescue from impending misery the heart of one anxious parent, I shall feel a much higher gratification . . . than could possibly result from the applause which might attend the most elegant finished piece of literature. . . .” (1). To judge the novel by modern standards is to deny both Rowson’s intent and the cultural effect of Charlotte Temple on the collective American conscious for more than 100 years. Examining the reasons for Charlotte Temple’s popularity reveals much about the politics, society, and culture for which it was written.

Charlotte Temple begins in England where the 15-year-old Charlotte is at school, away from her loving parents and grandfather. Temple is the darling of her family, a dutiful and affectionate daughter who adores her parents and grandfather. Her parents are in the midst of planning a surprise party for their daughter’s 16th birthday at the same instant that Temple meets the man who will cause her downfall. Temple does not readily appear the type of girl to disobey parents or commit a sexual sin. This is, in large part, Rowson’s point. That a girl as pious and virtuous as Temple could be deceived shows that anyone is subject to deception and, therefore, all should beware.

Lieutenant Montraville becomes infatuated with Temple when he sees her and her schoolmates leaving church a few days before his departure for America. With the aid of Temple’s unscrupulous teacher, Mademoiselle La Rue, Montraville is able to contrive several clandestine meetings with Temple that foster her increasing devotion. The first time Temple sneaks out of school with Miss La Rue, she feels terribly guilty: “I cannot think we have done exactly right in going out this evening Mademoiselle” (27). But La Rue, a woman “hardened in guilt” who will “spare no pains to bring down innocence and beauty to the shocking level with herself” (30), artfully persuades Temple that she has done no wrong, is a “foolish little prude,” and has won the heart of Montraville. With such encouragement from a trusted guardian, Temple cannot combat the desires of her own heart coupled with Montraville’s entreaties. When Montraville asks her to join him when his military company is deployed to America, Temple agrees in part because of Montraville’s impassioned plea: “Cruel Charlotte . . . if you disappoint my ardent hopes, by all that is sacred, this hand shall put a period to my existence. I cannot, I will not live without you!” Equally persuasive for Temple is that her trusted adviser La Rue plans to travel with her in the company of Montraville’s friend Belcour. Temple is seduced as much by the conniving but trusted woman as by the unthinking but sincere man.

Important for the sympathy Rowson hopes to generate, Temple is rendered unconscious in a fainting spell at the moment of elopement, so that the specific decision to leave her beloved family and trust her life and virtue to her seducer is not actually hers; she is borne away by Montraville, La Rue, and Belcour. This device allows Temple to remain a moral character despite having made an unwise choice. Although Temple’s sin is sexual in nature, she is described throughout as an innocent, a mere child, duped by misguided trust. For example, when the upstanding Mrs. Beauchamp, a stand-in for the sympathetic narrator, discovers on the boat to America that Temple is Montraville’s mistress, she comments, “But surely her mind is not depraved. The goodness of her heart is depicted in her ingenuous countenance” (66). Temple has allowed herself to be swayed from her devotion to her parents by La Rue; Temple is, therefore, not corrupt. Only when Temple overhears Beauchamp does she begin to realize the consequences of her mistake: she is too naive, too virtuous even, to understand seduction, let alone its moral and social penalties. Not until months later, alone in the house Montraville has set up for her outside New York City, does she fully understand herself as a fallen woman who cannot expect sympathy from any respectable person. Still, the narrator remains forgiving. She sends Beauchamp to help Temple, despite the social repercussions, and through her Temple finally is able to send a letter to her family. Temple’s parents are as forgiving as the narrator insists the reader be. The moment word arrives of Temple (Montraville has carefully destroyed all other letters she has written), Mr. Temple sets out to rescue his daughter and bring her home to England. But help comes too late.

Montraville quickly tires of Temple after he arrives in America, discovering true love in Julia Franklin, “the very reverse of Charlotte Temple” (73). His guilt about Temple prevents him from courting Franklin until his friend Belcour convinces him that Temple has been unfaithful. Montraville is willing to believe Belcour’s lie so that he may marry the wealthy Franklin with a clear conscience. Montraville promises, through Belcour, to always care for Temple and their unborn child. Belcour proves unworthy of even this trust and keeps the money for himself, hoping to win Temple’s dependence. But Temple, virtuous before and after her one sin, continually refuses Belcour’s advances so that he also abandons her, leaving her penniless and pregnant in a New York winter. When Temple’s heartless landlady throws her out, she must walk 10 miles in a snowstorm to the home of her old guardian La Rue, the only person she can think to turn to in this foreign land. La Rue has succeeded where Temple failed in gaining a sympathetic and rich husband. True to her selfish character, the evil La Rue remains unmoved and will do nothing to aid the suffering Temple. Instead, La Rue’s impoverished manservant takes Temple in, giving her a place to deliver a healthy daughter and wait for Mr. Temple to appear. He arrives in time to take his granddaughter in his arms and to watch his daughter die.

The narrator makes clear that sexual sin is not Charlotte Temple’s worst crime. When Temple repents on her deathbed, “her ingratitude to her parents [w]as what lay most heavy on her heart” (126), not her illegitimate pregnancy. The novel presents several examples of women who remain loyal to their parents and are, therefore, rewarded with a happy marriage, such as Julia Franklin and Lucy Temple, Charlotte Temple’s own mother. Temple is not only deserted and denied an honorable marriage to Montraville, but also is forsaken by her trusted maternal substitutes, Mme. Du Pont (the headmistress at her school), La Rue, and Beauchamp. Critic Julia Stern argues that this is the just consequence of leaving her own mother (77). Being abandoned by all familial ties is ultimately what leads to her death. Still, it is a redemptive death: just before Temple dies, “a sudden beam of joy passed across her languid features, she raised her eyes to heaven and then closed them forever” (127). The true villains of this tale, La Rue and Belcour, equally heartless and conniving, find no redemption. Instead, they both die violently (Montraville stabs Belcour in a duel) and miserably (La Rue languishes, forgotten, in a hospital near the Temples several years later). Montraville, truly penitent for his unjust treatment of Temple, lives “subject to severe fits of melancholy” for the rest of his days.

In her introduction to the novel, Ann Douglas notes the connections between Rowson’s tale and emerging melodrama on the American stage (xiv–xv). Rowson worked for some years as an actress and learned melodramatic strategies such as easily identifiable villains and heroes, a swift and just punishment or reward for each character according to his or her merits, and highly emotional scenes, meant to deliberately convey a clear, moral message. When the narrator frequently interrupts the story with an aside about how to read the related events, the narrator hopes to ensure a sympathetic response that will unite a heterogeneous American public (Stern, 37) and teach them the correct way to interpret the text (Forcey, 230). Many critics speculate that the way readers in the late 18th century understood the text is as an allegory: The virtuous Temple represents the new republic who willingly breaks from England but nevertheless suffers terribly from the rupture, as America does by losing so many lives in battle; or, Temple might represent all foreigners coming to America’s shores, hoping for a better life, but finding the American dream doesn’t apply to all equally.

Although Charlotte Temple was written by a British woman living in England and was published there originally in 1791, Americans considered the novel their own. The novel put the story of women, especially young women, at the center of a narrative. By addressing young readers directly, the narrator gives them an importance they did not usually enjoy (Woodward, 130). Using physical evidence from copies of original texts, Cathy Davidson notes Charlotte Temple was a novel read and reread, passed on and discussed by thousands of readers. She claims that through these readings the American public made the novel American (Davidson, 168). This democratic assertion is borne out by the “Charlotte cult” that searched for the real woman upon whom the fictional character was based and made pilgrimages in the 19th century to visit what was believed to be Charlotte’s grave in New York City (Davidson, 168). Susanna Rowson encouraged readers in their belief that the sentimental story was founded on real events when she subtitled the novel A Tale of Truth. There is no physical evidence to support this claim (the gravestone is real and can still be seen today, but it covers no grave), but readers easily crossed the line between fact and fiction, forging this pathetic account of betrayal and seduction into an early American legend.

Sources

Armstrong, Nancy. “Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 1–24.

Baron, Dennis. “‘My Vile Arts’: Male and Female Discourse in Charlotte Temple,” Studies in the Humanities 18, no. 2 (1992): 135–145.

Davidson, Cathy N. “The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple: The Biography of a Book.” In Reading in America, edited by Cathy N. Davidson. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Evans, Gareth. “Rakes, Coquettes and Republican Patriarchs: Class, Gender and Nation in Early American Sentimental Fiction,” Canadian Review of American Studies 25, no. 3 (1995): 41–62.

Forcey, Blythe. “Charlotte Temple and the End of the Epistolary,” American Literature 63, no. 2 (1991): 225–241.

Hansen, Klaus P. “The Sentimental Novel and Its Feminist Critique,” Early American Literature 26, no. 1 (1991): 39–54.

Parker, Patricia L. Susanna Rowson. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.

Rowson, Susanna. Charlotte Temple and Lucy Temple. Edited by Ann Douglas. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Stern, Julia. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Weil, Dorothy. In Defense of Women: Susanna Rowson (1762–1824). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976.

Woodward, Maureen L. “Female Captivity and the Deployment of Race in Three Early American Texts,” Papers on Language & Literature 32, no. 2 (1996): 115–146.