Cosella Wayne

Serialized in 1860 in the spiritualist periodical Banner of Light, Cosella Wayne: Or, Will and Destiny was the first novel by an American Jewish woman to be written and published in English. It is also the first coming-of-age novel of its kind to portray Jewish life in the United States. The book never came out in bound form, was ignored by the Jewish press of its time, and has been overlooked by scholars of nineteenth-century American Jewish writing. Even so, it anticipates many concerns that later defined American Jewish literature, including intermarriage, strained generational bonds, troubled families, Jewish-Christian relations, immigration, poverty, women's place within Jewish communities, the nature of romantic attachment, and the pull between fate and free choice.

The story follows a young woman's struggle to find her footing in the layered social world of nineteenth-century America, beginning with a painful bond between her and a Jewish father who abused her. Her path leads through the loss of respectability and financial ruin as an unmarried Jewish woman, years of hardship as an orphaned seamstress, a turn away from Judaism and a later return to it, and an effort to reconcile being Jewish with being a spiritualist. The novel stands apart for taking up these experiences from a Jewish woman's point of view.

Jonathan Sarna, who wrote the introduction, found the novel while doing research at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. This edition adds excerpts from Cora Wilburn's diary, recently rediscovered and printed in an appendix. Together, the novel and diary place Wilburn within the life and times of one of the least-known yet most productive female Jewish writers of nineteenth-century America.