DOOMED ROMANCE

Historian Heyrman, winner of the Bancroft and Francis Parkman prizes, reconstructs a scandal that reveals 19th-century evangelicals’ clashing and often retrograde views of women.

“Centuries before the invention of social media, conservative evangelicals dabbled in the dark art of character assassination with anonymous letters and gossip, threats and blackmail, the promise of punishment in this life and the next,” writes the author. She exposes them all with panache in this narrative history of two doomed romances: one involving a young New England teacher and the other centered on the love affair many 19th-century American women had with evangelicalism, which instilled in them heady visions of adventures like overseas missionary work but denied them full participation in them. Much of this book reads like a Jane Austen novel, with aspects that, however coincidental, may seem uncannily familiar to fans of Pride and Prejudice: an intelligent, marriageable woman, obstacle-beset suitors, a loyal sister, an ineffectual mother, an entailed estate, and even a key figure who shares a name with the Bennet family. In 1825, Martha Parker agreed to marry her second cousin, the caddish schoolmaster Thomas Tenney, then rejected him for the clergyman and future missionary Elnathan Gridley. Tenney’s friends sent an anonymous letter to the evangelical missions board besmirching Parker’s seemingly unimpeachable character—further baselessly impugned by the president of Dartmouth, Tenney’s alma mater—and the meddling helped to quash Parker’s hope of going abroad with Gridley. While maintaining an Austen-ian suspense about who Parker ultimately married, Heyrman suggests how the episode relates to broader 19th-century debates on matters such as women’s rights, clerical celibacy, sexual double standards, and homosexuality among missionaries. Few characters emerge from the book looking good, but Parker’s story is a colorful and enlightening footnote to history that deals with issues that remain pertinent to this day.

Unholy treatment of a marriageable young woman by religious leaders, served up with novelistic flair.