ABSTRACT
Resisting the academy's privileging of the printed book, which has made Memoir the most durable and only lasting representation of Catharine Brown, this chapter recovers Brown's larger body of letters-letters collected in Memoir, printed in periodicals, and surviving in manuscript form-and considers them outside of the framework provided by Anderson's controlling biographical narrative. Rather than viewing Brown's writings as supporting evidence for Anderson's claims, the chapter considers Brown's letters as letters within the contexts that informed their production and reception, including nineteenth-century letter-writing instruction and the cultural attitudes and assumptions about race, class, gender, and character out of which letter-writing practices emerged. Considering Catharine Brown's letters- those published as part of Memoir as distinct from Memoir and within the contexts opened up by epistolary studies grants her due agency as an author, and reveals her subtle and sophisticated manipulations of letter-writing conventions to counter her period's dominant attitudes toward Native Americans.
