Page "Charles Brockden Brown" Paragraph 4

During most of the 1790s, Brown developed his literary ambitions in projects that often remained incomplete ( for example the so-called " Henrietta Letters ," transcribed in the Clark biography ) and frequently used his correspondence with friends as a sort of laboratory for narrative experiments.

His first publications appeared during the late 1780s ( e. g. " The Rhapsodist " essay series from 1789 ), but generally he published little during this period.

By 1798, however, these formative years gave way to a period of novel-writing during which Brown published the titles for which he is best known.

In complex ways, these novels and the rest of Brown's career are informed by the progressive ideas he uses and develops from the period's British radical-democratic writers, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Robert Bage.

Brown was influenced by these writers and in turn exerted an influence on them and their younger studiers, for example in Godwin's later novels, or in the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, who reread Brown as she wrote her novels Frankenstein ; or, The Modern Prometheus ( 1818 ) and The Last Man ( 1826 ).