Zoraida; or, The Witch of Naumkeag

Published in 1845 and set in New England during colonial times, this novella-sized work of early American fiction tells the story of an insulted, newly-pregnant, English wife who runs away from her marriage, travels across the ocean to New England, and ends up living in the woods where she is regarded as a witch by both the Indian tribes and the colonists—a label she encourages rather than discourages so people will leave her alone.  “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” and all that.

The credited author, “Egbert Augustus Cowslip, Esq.,” is the pseudonym for a writer named Benjamin Barker, a man whose actual identity is sufficiently opaque, at least to the modern reader, that it hardly warrants disguise.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.