Studies in Romanticism (Winter 2021): 419–433 | © 2022 Trustees of Boston University 419 MICHAEL GAMER AND KATRINA O ’ LOUGHLIN Unpacking Harriet Newell’s Library A lthough she remains relatively unknown to literary historians today, Harriet Atwood Newell was one of the Romantic era’s best-selling authors. Going through more than eighty editions in the United States and United Kingdom between 1814 and 1840, her Memoirs (Boston, 1814; London, 1816) efectively established a genre, the missionary memoir, as well as cementing a place for women within that emerging movement. 1 Newell’s fate as the frst American missionary to die abroad—at nineteen, and shortly after the birth and death of her only child—ensured her status as a public fgure. Even before news of her death reached North America in August of 1813, her letters had found an enthusiastic readership in The Panoplist and The Connecticut Evangelical Magazine. 2 With an eye to the promotion of their missionary cause, her husband Samuel Newell had begun sending extracts of her correspondence with his own dispatches on their arrival in Calcutta in June of 1812. Reporting her death six months later, he included copies of Newell’s account of the voyage out, her brief India journal, and most recent correspondence.These papers, along with those of Newell’s girlhood (likely supplied by her mother Mary Atwood), were placed in the hands of the Reverend Leonard Woods late in 1813. By early 1814 Woods had fnished his selection and compilation, prefacing Newell’s writings with a sermon of his own composition. Samuel Armstrong, Boston publisher of the Panoplist, advertised the volume under the ungainly title of A Sermon Preached at Haverhill in Remembrance of Mrs. Harriet Newell, wife of the Rev. Samuel Newell, Missionary to India. Who Died at the Isle of France, Nov. 30, 1812, Aged 19 Years. To which are added Memoirs of her Life (1814). (Later editions reversed the order of the contents and carried the simpler title Memoirs of Mrs. Harriet Newell. 3 ) Its 1. Appearing in Anna Maria Lee’s Memoirs of Eminent Female Writers (1827) alongside Baillie, Barbauld, Burney, Edgeworth, Macauley, More, Opie, Owenson, and Ann Radclife, Newell receives more sustained coverage (fve pages) than any Romantic writer except Barbauld and Radclife. 2. See Panoplist (March 1813): 468–73; (April 1813): 515–23; (August 1813): 131–35; and Connecticut Evangelical Magazine and Religious Intelligencer 6 (1813): 235–39, 278–79, 351–56. 3. Our text for this essay is Armstrong’s second edition of 1814. Newell, A Sermon Preached at Haverhill in Remembrance of Mrs. Harriet Newell, wife of the Rev. Samuel Newell, Missionary to India. Who Died at the Isle of France, Nov. 30, 1812, Aged 19 Years. To which are added Memoirs of her Life, ed. Leonard Woods, 2nd ed. (Boston: Samuel T. Armstrong, 1814). All further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.