Was “Charlotte Temple” America’s First Bestselling Novel?

Long before bestseller lists and BookTok, there was “Charlotte Temple,” an 18th-century novel that created one of America’s first and most lasting literary fandoms. Actress Susanna Rowson’s melodramatic tale of Charlotte, a young English girl seduced and abandoned by a British soldier during the American Revolution, was a whiz-bang bestseller from the moment it was first published in 1791,