During the months that Nancy has been away, the girl has run out of food and money. I’ll add, too, that though Cap was raised by Nancy she is strangely unmoved by her death.īack in New York, Capitola’s previously desperate situation has become even more dire. This is a shame, as this part of the novel is my favourite, genuinely gothic and horrible, with a dead baby substituted for a live one, a blood red birth mark, a dead woman in an attic, the servant who sees all. Within hours of revealing the secret to Cap’s uncle, Nancy dies. Although the elderly woman succeeds in her quest, the trip exhausts her. Leaving her ward with a stock of food and money, Nancy sets out for the South. Now, the aged and ailing Nancy Grewell feels that the time has come to finally reveal the girl’s existence. For more than a decade, the nurse who brought Capitola to New York and has been serving as her guardian has hidden the Virginia heiress. Whisked away at birth to prevent her father’s greedy brother from murdering her, Cap is unaware of her heritage, and her maternal relatives are, in turn, unaware of her existence. There was also a line of clothing, labelled the ‘Capitola look’ after the heroine.Įchoing a trope of nineteenth-century literature as well as many children’s classics, the thirteen-year-old girl is penniless, homeless, and alone when first introduced to readers.

One of the most (in)famous featured seasoned actor (and future presidential assassin) John Wilkes Booth in the role of the novel’s most notorious villain, Black Donald. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s *Uncle Tom’s Cabin*, Southworth’s novel was both adapted for the stage, with at least forty dramatic adaptations of the novel made during Southworth’s lifetime. *The Hidden Hand* was a cultural phenomenon as well as a literary one. Praised by critics and adored by readers, the narrative was printed in Robert Bonner’s New York Ledger in 1859, 1868, 1869, and again in 1883, before being released in book form in 1888. Southworth, was the author of *The Hidden Hand* a bestseller.

Southworth.Įmma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth, or E.D. In 1884 the Bigelow Free Public Library in Clinton, Massachusetts, circulated 35,820 books, and listed the most popular writers of fiction as William T. 08:22 pm - EDEN Southworth, The Hidden Hand (1859)

The Hidden Hand by E.D.E.N. Southworth