Ormond; or, the Secret Witness

Brown's Ormond, set in Philadelphia after the American Revolution, confronts popular societal debates of the period, including women's education and marriage, and focuses on a young woman, Constantia, who struggles in the midst of family financial ruin and a yellow fever epidemic. Similar to Brown's other novels like Wieland, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn, Ormond is often considered a gothic novel because it explores themes such as murder, disease, and sensationalized romance.

“Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro have produced an awesome edition of Brown's Ormond by providing copious explanatory notes and helpful documentation of the essential historical context of feminist, radical, egalitarian, and abolitionist expression. Oh, ye patriots, read it and learn! --Peter Linebaugh, University of Toledo”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is an important figure in Gothic literature, credited with writing one of the first American Gothic novels. He was born in Pennsylvania to a Quaker family and originally trained to become a lawyer. Unable to apply the Gothic European settings of crumbling castles to America, he relocated his tales to rural locales, but maintained the same chilling atmosphere within his stories. Philip Barnard is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. Stephen Shapiro is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

As it tells the story of Constantia Dudley, from her family's financial collapse to her encounters with a series of cosmopolitan revolutionaries and reactionaries, Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond; or The Secret Witness (1799) develops a sustained meditation on late-Enlightenment debates concerning political liberty, women's rights, conventions of sex-gender, and their relation to the reshaping of an Atlantic world in the throes of transformation. This edition of Ormond includes Brown's Alcuin (1798), an important dialogue on women's rights and marriage, as well as his key essays on history and literature, along with selections from contemporary writings on women's education and revolution debates that figure in the novel's background and in the charged atmosphere of the late 1790s.

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