Secret History; Or, the Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura

If its subject matter was not in itself a sufficient source of interest, both in its own day and in ours, the notoriety of its main addressee might have made it a sensation, for this epistolary narrative is addressed to the author's reputed lover Aaron Burr - dueler, libertine, seditious conspirator, and, by the time the novel was published, vortex of early national fantasy and fear. It moves fluently between genres as varied as travelogue, epistolary narrative, sentimental and gothic novel, and political reportage, and it shifts with disconcerting ease between a decadent domestic realm of balls and erotic intrigues in a besieged Cap Français and the violent warfare of revolution itself.