100 pages 3 hours read

Hannah Webster Foster

The Coquette

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1797

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Letters 37-41

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Letter 37 Summary: “To Mr. Charles Deighton”

Major Sanford begins to feel hope again now that he has been permitted back into a degree of intimacy with Eliza. He wishes he could marry her, but he believes that his lack of fortune would frustrate her “expectation of affluence and splendor” which “would afford a perpetual source of discontent and mutual wretchedness” (72). 

Sanford plans to follow Eliza to Boston in order to break her connection with Mr. Boyer. 

Sanford discovers that Miss Laurence is partial to him. Because she has property, marrying her would mend his financial woes. Sanford notes that because she knows his character, “she must bear the consequences” if she thinks she can reform him (72). However, Major Sanford can get by at the moment without marrying her and plans to do so only when absolutely necessary

Major Sanford begins to feel hope again now that he has been permitted back into a degree of intimacy with Eliza. He wishes he could marry her, but he believes that his lack of fortune would frustrate her “expectation of affluence and splendor” which “would afford a perpetual source of discontent and mutual wretchedness” (72). 

Sanford plans to follow Eliza to Boston in order to break her connection with Mr. Boyer.