Kavanagh (novel)

Kavanagh is a novel by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...

. Longefellow began writing the story in 1847 and it was published in 1849.

It tells the story of a country romance. Besides a character named Kavanagh, among its characters is a school teacher named Mr. Churchill, who has always planned to write a Romance, but whose procrastination never allows him to start, until late in life he resigns himself to his "destiny".

Longfellow also used the novel to argue against the view, in the book propounded by a character based on Cornelius Mathews

Cornelius Mathews

Cornelius Mathews , was an American writer, best known for his crucial role in the formation of a literary group known as Young America in the late 1830s, with editor Evert Duyckinck and author William Gilmore Simms....

, that American literature must be entirely devoid of European influences and be exclusively national. Instead, Longfellow felt that American literature could and should be universalist, with its unique North American influences. He saw the use of European models not as imitation but as a "continuation" that Americans could be proud of.

Of the novel, Robert L. Gale writes in A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion that
Kavanagh was also a precursor of local color writing, and "it depicts what is probably the first lesbian relationship in American fiction".

Online text

• Etext at the University of Virginia Library
• Ebook by Project Gutenberg Consortia Center
• Scanned book at Google Books