Fall River recreates a notorious incident in Fall River, Massachusetts: the trial of a Methodist minister for the murder of a pregnant mill worker whom it was suspected he had seduced. The work offers a view of the lives of poor factory girls and clerical corruption in early New England industrial towns.

"The opportunities offered by the explosion of knowledge about early modern women writers in the past two decades also pose a sometimes formidable challenge. For some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English women writers-Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, Aemilia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Clifford, and Elizabeth Cary-the critical literature has already become voluminous. For others, such as Anne Lock and Lucy Hutchinson, recent editions of exceptional...