100 pages • 3 hours read
Hannah Webster FosterThe Coquette
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1797A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Letters 70-74Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Letter 70 Summary: “To Mr. Charles Deighton”
Sanford is delighted to have removed Eliza from the scrutiny of her friends’ supervision. He is unable to comprehend her grief at leaving her mother’s house, but it affects him emotionally. He is “almost a penitent,” whether he “were sincere or not” (157).
Eliza believes she will not survive childbirth, nor does she want to. Sanford worries he will lose his mind if he loses her. He hopes to eventually provoke his wife into divorce and marry Eliza, though he expresses his distaste for a wife he knows “to be seducible” (157).
Nancy Sanford is very suspicious of her husband. He retorts that she knew his character before they were married and should not have expected anything else.
Major Sanford feels sorry for Eliza and blames her faults on the faults of women as a whole. He also blames Eliza’s friends; if they had been less cold toward him, he would not have wished revenge upon them. Ruining Eliza has also ruined his reputation in town, and Sanford may have to leave.
Eliza forgives Sanford and wishes for his honest “repentance and reformation” (159). She hopes that she is his last victim. Eliza hopes her story serves as an example for other women: she does not wish others to suffer her fate. She blames herself for not listening to her friends’ warnings.
Leaving her at an inn, Sanford is mortified at her remonstrations. However, he hopes that after she has recovered, she will return to her accustomed levity. He expects “peace and pleasure” in the near future (160).
Letter 71 Summary: “To Mrs. Lucy Sumner”
Julia hears that Sanford’s “property was attached, and he a prisoner in his own house” (161). She writes to him, asking about Eliza’s whereabouts; two weeks later, he responds that he does not know, but hopes to soon.
A friend brings them a Boston newspaper. Through this, they discover that Eliza died after giving birth in July—alone in Danvers, alone among strangers. Mrs. Wharton succumbs to sorrow, and it is a long time before Julia can render her some comfort.
Eliza’s brother visits the scene of her death. Though she was in a strange town, those around her had “a lively sense of her merit and misfortunes” (162). He discovers that her child died as well.
Major Sanford “is quite frantic” (163). His wife, his mistress, his estate, and his money are all gone. Julia views this a just retribution for his evil deeds.
Julia and Mrs. Wharton mourn not just Eliza’s death, but the loss of her virtue and honor. Julia denounces the arts of seduction that lead to her friend’s ruin, wishing them to be “exposed, and stamped with universal ignominy” (164).
Letter 72 Summary: “To Mr. Charles Deighton”
Major Sanford is utterly distraught at the loss of Eliza. His conscience brands him the murderer of Eliza.
Sanford’s extravagant lifestyle depleted Nancy’s fortune, and his property has been foreclosed and reclaimed. When he meant to seek out Eliza, he had to shut himself up in the house to avoid creditors. By the time he could leave, it was too late. He has lost all of his property, he has lost his wife, and he has lost Eliza.
Sanford plans to leave America to distance himself from everything that reminds him of Eliza, but he knows that the sight of her final goodbye will be burned into his mind forever, and her final advice and the “horror of conscience” it gave him will last forever (165).
While dying, Eliza found religious consolation, which Sanford always “ridiculed as priestcraft and hypocrisy” (165). He longs for the comfort that the religious feel during trial and tribulation.
Major Sanford bids his friend Charles Deighton a final farewell. Looking at his past fills him with disgust; looking at his future fills him with fear. He warns Deighton to “shun the dangerous paths” he has walked so he will “never be involved in the hopeless ignominy and wretchedness” of his new life” (166).
Letter 73 Summary: “To Miss Julia Granby”
Lucy Sumner mourns the loss of her close friend. She promises to keep Eliza’s memory alive in her heart. She cannot fathom the loss that Mrs. Wharton must be feeling, but knows it is a consolation that Eliza is at rest. Lucy wishes Eliza’s tragic tale to be “engraved on every heart” so that all of womankind “can secure lasting felicity” (168).
Letter 74 Summary: “To Mrs. Wharton”
Julia and Lucy visit Eliza’s grave. They are reassured by the fact that the people of the town where Eliza died treated her kindly in her final days and gave her a proper burial. Lucy has a proper headstone erected for Eliza; its inscription describes Eliza’s virtue. She hopes that these proceedings will help assuage Mrs. Wharton’s grief.
Letters 70-74 Analysis
Major Sanford’s guilt is twofold: he has not only ruined Eliza, but he has also desecrated his society’s sacred institution of marriage. Though Sanford is more reliant than most men of his era on the support of his wife, he continually abuses her through neglect, contempt, and his preference for Eliza. When he has finished squandering her money on his lifestyle of dissipation, she leaves him destitute and returns home.
Though Sanford has lost much through his affair with Eliza, Eliza’s condition reveals a dark truth: sexual affairs are inherently more dangerous for women, especially in an era predating modern medicine. Many women of Eliza’s time died in childbirth due to complications stemming from lack of sanitation or proper medical attention. By the time she gives birth, Eliza’s health has been ravaged by consumption, an archaic term for medical disorder (typically, tuberculosis, but not always). This illness was brought on by her guilt; because of this, Foster makes a direct link between spiritual health and physical health. Eliza’s disorder is initially only mental: it is guilt and melancholy stemming from how she treated Mr. Boyer. But as her sins compound, and as she begins a sexual affair with Sanford, it begins to take a physical toll on her health, culminating in consumption and death.
Lucy and Julia mourn the loss of their friend and ensure that Eliza’s legacy will be a warning to future women. Her story is an example “that virtue alone, independent of the trappings of wealth, the parade of equipage, and the adulation of gallantry, can secure lasting felicity” (167-68). This is a harsh denouncement of Sanford’s behavior, and of other men who behave as he does. Foster posits the idea that not only will living a life of dissipation, pleasure, and materialism lead to unhappiness, it will lead to a path of self-destruction. It is important to note that Eliza’s death was completely avoidable: if she had listened to her friends, if she had fallen in line with societal expectations, she would have lived a happy life.
