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The Emigrants
Imlay’s delightful epistolary adventure of 1793, set on the American frontier, was one of the first American novels. The trials of an emigrant family in the Ohio River Valley of Kentucky contrast the decadence of Europe with the utopian promise of the American West. Its sensational love plots also dramatize the novel’s surprising feminist allegiances.
368 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 24, 2020
so. bad.
March 31, 2025
Penguin was scraping the bottom of the literary barrel when they decided that this flowery epistle should listed as a classic.
December 16, 2025
Though not devoid of scholarly interest, I found little in The Emigrants (1793) that qualifies as “delightful.” Typical of the epistolary genre, the novel is a series of letters between characters designated by initials, though names occasionally slip in. Several 18th-century American locales are clumsily stitched into what is essentially a novel of British manners. Upon that curious foundation a raft of political theorizing conceals the author’s real motive: to sell dubious real estate in Kentucky (circa 1790s) to dupes in England.
To the book: Their fortune squandered in social climbing, the T_____n family decamps to America to preserve the remnant of their estate. Hounded by creditors even in Philadelphia, the family departs for the western frontier on the Ohio River. They cross a remarkable Pennsylvania where mountain laurel bloom in September and the Appalachians are but a single 50-mile wide speed-bump. These are just a few of the many inconsistencies of time and place. Prior to this novel, Imlay had compiled a best-selling book stuffed with exhaustive descriptions of the region (A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America), yet not a single observation in the The Emigrants reveals more than a generic conception of locales in the US..
The family winters in Pittsburgh, exchanging letters between Philadelphia, England, and a long-lost uncle discovered just a dozen miles up the Monongahela River. Caroline, the breathtakingly beautiful, cultured, delicate-yet-sprightly romantic lead, who stoically walks over The Mountain to spare the horses, reveals her super-power: she faints at the sight of Native Americans.
Spring arrives. The 700-mile boat ride down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Louisville, Kentucky, passes between chapters. Those pesky Natives kidnap Caroline, leading to a chase of improbable distances across Illinois and Missouri, finally offering our romantic hero, Arl____ton, the opportunity to observe the semi-conscious, semi-naked damsel recumbent in a bower. Such is the state of bodice-ripping on the American frontier. The conclusion of their romance is easily guessed.
The brave new world of The Emigrants lies in contrast to the decadence of America’s east coast -- irredeemably polluted by British influence -- and the chaotic evil across the Ohio, where “savages” dwell. The novel’s theme, expressed in endless variation, is the degeneracy of British society and the relative cultural advancement of civilization on the frontier. The miserable state of British women, essentially stripped of all legal rights upon marriage and nearly without legal recourse to divorce, is declaimed at every opportunity.
For me, the interest in The Emigrants lies in teasing out who actually wrote it. Imlay was, to put it mildly, a scoundrel, cad, slave-trader, smuggler, and swindler ever a half-step ahead of the law. His misalliance with Mary Wollstonecraft resulted in a daughter as well as her important works on feminism. Early sections of the The Emigrants display Wollstonecraft’s arguments in the guise of various characters, developed in her typical manner, expressed in her characteristic vocabulary (“animadvert,”,“tervigorate”), and decorated with her idiosyncratic punctuation. No less than 50 pages are devoted to Wollstonecraft’s idee fixe: an innocent woman trapped in a loveless marriage with an abusive bounder. (The theme is briefly recapitulated at the end of the novel with different characters.)
Imlay, in documents unambiguously from his hand, proves to be a straightforward writer. Later sections of The Emigrants seem most probably his. I suspect a third author in the mix, occasionally breaking in with exuberant landscape descriptions that reveal nothing but ignorance of the purported locale -- the rapids of the Ohio River at Louisville are exclaimed in terms more suitable for Niagara -- or in letters from one generic character to another. I will venture a modest theory -- that Imlay acquired a mostly-finished manuscript from some unknown London scribbler, to which Mary W. attached some opening arguments and Imlay attached the conclusion, back-filling with the occasional political diatribe as he did in A Topographical Description.
Modern critics generally admit that elements of the novel are distinctly Wollstonecraftian. Robert Hare, in his facsimile of the 1794 Dublin edition (1964) credits authorship thus: “Traditionally Ascribed to Gilbert Imlay But, More Probably, By Mary Wollstonecraft.” Hare asserts, “The novel certainly was not … ‘written in America,’ and if Mary Wollstonecraft wrote it, then it is of course no American novel at all.”
In contrast, the Gilroy and Verhoeven-edited Penguin edition under consideration here emphatically states that “there is no evidence whatsoever that Wollstonecraft contributed in any way to The Emigrants (...), except perhaps indirectly through her emancipatory tract 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.'” Verhoeven maintains this position, albeit somewhat less confidently, in his later Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World (2015).
Much critical ink has been spilled on the utopian community described near the end of the novel. This takes up little more than two pages of more than 250. How a retired captain of the Revolutionary War finances a whopping 256-square mile tract in Kentucky-- to be parceled out to retired war vets -- is never established.
Of the feminist themes, the Kentucky utopia of The Emigrants does not seem all that progressive. Men in the proposed community have a vote in the republican system; women spend their days on homemaking and self improvement. (Even at her most strident, Wollstonecraft did not promote women’s suffrage, only a parallel “parliament” of and for women.) If liberalized divorce laws in the colonies were the ideal so often expressed in the novel, Pennsylvania was the place to be. Blame the Quakers.
Were it not for contemporary interest in Wollstonecraft, The Emigrants would likely remain in the dustbin of history. A first “American Novel”? American’s only “Jacobin novel”? In one compelling interpretation, the first “Southern” novel? A first “feminist” novel? I have no dog in that fight. Only a cynic such as myself might suspect that pushing the “American” angle of this most boring, most British book of manners might finesse it into the syllabi of American Literature / American Studies courses, and pump up sales. If not Gilbert Imlay's most successful scam -- the book barely sold in its initial publication, and is hardly tearing up the modern book market -- the novel could well be his most enduring scam.
To the book: Their fortune squandered in social climbing, the T_____n family decamps to America to preserve the remnant of their estate. Hounded by creditors even in Philadelphia, the family departs for the western frontier on the Ohio River. They cross a remarkable Pennsylvania where mountain laurel bloom in September and the Appalachians are but a single 50-mile wide speed-bump. These are just a few of the many inconsistencies of time and place. Prior to this novel, Imlay had compiled a best-selling book stuffed with exhaustive descriptions of the region (A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America), yet not a single observation in the The Emigrants reveals more than a generic conception of locales in the US..
The family winters in Pittsburgh, exchanging letters between Philadelphia, England, and a long-lost uncle discovered just a dozen miles up the Monongahela River. Caroline, the breathtakingly beautiful, cultured, delicate-yet-sprightly romantic lead, who stoically walks over The Mountain to spare the horses, reveals her super-power: she faints at the sight of Native Americans.
Spring arrives. The 700-mile boat ride down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Louisville, Kentucky, passes between chapters. Those pesky Natives kidnap Caroline, leading to a chase of improbable distances across Illinois and Missouri, finally offering our romantic hero, Arl____ton, the opportunity to observe the semi-conscious, semi-naked damsel recumbent in a bower. Such is the state of bodice-ripping on the American frontier. The conclusion of their romance is easily guessed.
The brave new world of The Emigrants lies in contrast to the decadence of America’s east coast -- irredeemably polluted by British influence -- and the chaotic evil across the Ohio, where “savages” dwell. The novel’s theme, expressed in endless variation, is the degeneracy of British society and the relative cultural advancement of civilization on the frontier. The miserable state of British women, essentially stripped of all legal rights upon marriage and nearly without legal recourse to divorce, is declaimed at every opportunity.
For me, the interest in The Emigrants lies in teasing out who actually wrote it. Imlay was, to put it mildly, a scoundrel, cad, slave-trader, smuggler, and swindler ever a half-step ahead of the law. His misalliance with Mary Wollstonecraft resulted in a daughter as well as her important works on feminism. Early sections of the The Emigrants display Wollstonecraft’s arguments in the guise of various characters, developed in her typical manner, expressed in her characteristic vocabulary (“animadvert,”,“tervigorate”), and decorated with her idiosyncratic punctuation. No less than 50 pages are devoted to Wollstonecraft’s idee fixe: an innocent woman trapped in a loveless marriage with an abusive bounder. (The theme is briefly recapitulated at the end of the novel with different characters.)
Imlay, in documents unambiguously from his hand, proves to be a straightforward writer. Later sections of The Emigrants seem most probably his. I suspect a third author in the mix, occasionally breaking in with exuberant landscape descriptions that reveal nothing but ignorance of the purported locale -- the rapids of the Ohio River at Louisville are exclaimed in terms more suitable for Niagara -- or in letters from one generic character to another. I will venture a modest theory -- that Imlay acquired a mostly-finished manuscript from some unknown London scribbler, to which Mary W. attached some opening arguments and Imlay attached the conclusion, back-filling with the occasional political diatribe as he did in A Topographical Description.
Modern critics generally admit that elements of the novel are distinctly Wollstonecraftian. Robert Hare, in his facsimile of the 1794 Dublin edition (1964) credits authorship thus: “Traditionally Ascribed to Gilbert Imlay But, More Probably, By Mary Wollstonecraft.” Hare asserts, “The novel certainly was not … ‘written in America,’ and if Mary Wollstonecraft wrote it, then it is of course no American novel at all.”
In contrast, the Gilroy and Verhoeven-edited Penguin edition under consideration here emphatically states that “there is no evidence whatsoever that Wollstonecraft contributed in any way to The Emigrants (...), except perhaps indirectly through her emancipatory tract 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.'” Verhoeven maintains this position, albeit somewhat less confidently, in his later Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World (2015).
Much critical ink has been spilled on the utopian community described near the end of the novel. This takes up little more than two pages of more than 250. How a retired captain of the Revolutionary War finances a whopping 256-square mile tract in Kentucky-- to be parceled out to retired war vets -- is never established.
Of the feminist themes, the Kentucky utopia of The Emigrants does not seem all that progressive. Men in the proposed community have a vote in the republican system; women spend their days on homemaking and self improvement. (Even at her most strident, Wollstonecraft did not promote women’s suffrage, only a parallel “parliament” of and for women.) If liberalized divorce laws in the colonies were the ideal so often expressed in the novel, Pennsylvania was the place to be. Blame the Quakers.
Were it not for contemporary interest in Wollstonecraft, The Emigrants would likely remain in the dustbin of history. A first “American Novel”? American’s only “Jacobin novel”? In one compelling interpretation, the first “Southern” novel? A first “feminist” novel? I have no dog in that fight. Only a cynic such as myself might suspect that pushing the “American” angle of this most boring, most British book of manners might finesse it into the syllabi of American Literature / American Studies courses, and pump up sales. If not Gilbert Imlay's most successful scam -- the book barely sold in its initial publication, and is hardly tearing up the modern book market -- the novel could well be his most enduring scam.
April 1, 2024
I never met an early (pre-1820) American novel that I didn’t enjoy, so I was delighted when Penguin saw fit to reprint Gilbert Imlay’s seldom-mentioned The Emigrants (1793). Now, the academic reasons for the reprint as made clear in the introductory materials have very little to do with why I find the novel appealing; the current (obsessive) preoccupations of academia, which I needn’t spell out, interest me much less than many other things. But I’ll happily take the reprint anyway! Since this is a rather complicated epistolary novel, I recommend keeping a character (and relationship) list from the beginning. It is really a charming read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews