Cosella Wayne

“This fascinating volume by the little-known American Jewish writer Cora Wilburn offers new insight about Jewish women authors during the nineteenth century. Serialized literature, as much of this volume is, can seem slow when compiled into a single unit, and, moreover, nineteenth-century literary sensibilities can seem florid when compared to those of the twenty-first. Fortunately, Jonathan Sarna provides a penetrating analysis to help readers appreciate the significance and the literary strength of Wilburn’s work. . . . Readers can find much to reward their effort in this volume. The human search for meaning, solace, and a place in the world is not confined to any particular century.”
—The American Jewish Archives Journal

“Once again Jonathan Sarna astonishes us. This time snippets of prose and poetry by an unknown nineteenth-century writer led him to discover Cora Wilburn, her diary, and her novel Cosella Wayne. Wilburn’s musings on immigration, poverty, family dysfunction, religious doubt, and spiri­tual seeking, drawn from her own life, compel a rethinking of the dawn of American Jewish literature and its themes. Thanks to this eminent historian, Cora Wilburn, a woman banished from our cultural memory, reclaims her rightful place.”
—Pamela S. Nadell, author of America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today
 

“Thanks to Jonathan Sarna’s literary-historical detective work, readers now have access to the first novel by a Jewish American woman writer. Complex and gripping, Cora Wilburn’s Cosella Wayne is a fascinating look at nineteenth-century women’s relationships to various religious movements—most notably, Judaism and spiritualism. An important source for scholars of religion, transnational literature, and American women’s writing, this edition is made more valuable by Sarna’s informa­tive introduction and notes, as well as selections from Wilburn’s diary.”
—Lori Harrison-Kahan, editor of The Superwoman and Other Writ­ings by Miriam Michelson and author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary
 

“Jonathan Sarna’s edition of Cosella Wayne renders accessible to general readers—as well as to students and scholars of modern history, women’s and gender studies, religion, and Jewish studies—the gripping tale of the global adventures and personal travails of its inimitable heroine, Cosella Wayne. Engrossing as a work of literature and enthralling as a window onto the life and world of its remarkable author, Cora Wilburn, Cosella Wayne is a family saga that grapples mightily with the nature of religious conversion, the implications of gender, the oppressiveness of poverty, and the destructiveness of child abuse. It paints intimate portraits of nineteenth-century Jewish and Spiritualist practices as well as of a cou­rageous young woman’s search for truth, love, and belonging. This highly readable edition will be particularly welcome in university classrooms, where it will draw students deep into the fundamental questions that ani­mate a range of disciplines.”
—Paola Tartakoff, Rutgers University