ABSTRACT
On August 7, 1815, an unknown young woman called Rachel Mordecai sat down in Warrenton, North Carolina, to write her first letter to the celebrated Maria Edgeworth, to protest the latter's negative and stereotyped representations of Jews. Rachel's first letter prompted Maria to make what Richard Lovell called 'amende honorable' for misrepresenting the Jews, by writing her novella, Harrington. Epistolary codes of style, content and address were finely tuned to express every nuance of such relations. When Rachel sent Maria an Indian Peace Treaty as her first gift, Maria invited her to 'write freely' for the first time. Rachel's letter was all the evidence Maria needed that a gentile education gentile values changed the character of Jews. Edgeworth uses scenes like the auction scene to undercut the premises on which this kind of assimilation was based. Maria considered the books had the 'stamp of truth' when, in addition to being based on a core of historical truth.
