What Lies Beneath the Gravestone of a Fictional It Girl?
The sight of the tomb might have evoked sighs or even tears in the tender-hearted readers of Susanna Rowson’s 1791 novel Charlotte, A Tale of Truth, who would have recalled how Miss Temple, a naive 16-year-old British girl, had been seduced by the villainous rake Lord Montraville, brought to America, and then abandoned as he went off to marry another woman and fight in the Revolutionary War.