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The American Gilbert Imlay is known to readers of British Romanticism as the cad who abandoned Mary Wollstonecraft, the founding mother of modern feminism. Few are as well-acquainted with The Emigrants, Imlay's delightful epistolary novel set in the Ohio River Valley of Kentucky, then the American frontier. The Emigrants (1793), one of the first American novels, contrasts the rigid political structures of England with the promise of the American West as a socially just utopia. Its sensational love plots also dramtize the plight of women trapped in degrading marriages, frankly advocating relaxed divorce laws. In their authoritative essay, scholars Verhoeven and Gilroy assess The Emigrants' feminism and its anticolonial agenda, and provide an excellent introduction to Gilbert Imlay: reprobate, land booster, revoluntionary, and writer.
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