As it tells the story of Constantia Dudley, from her family's financial collapse to her encounters with a series of cosmopolitan revolutionaries and reactionaries, Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond; or The Secret Witness (1799) develops a sustained meditation on late-Enlightenment debates concerning political liberty, women's rights, conventions of sex-gender, and their relation to the reshaping of an Atlantic world in the throes of transformation.

This edition of Ormond includes Brown's Alcuin (1798), an important dialogue on women's rights and marriage, as well as his key essays on history and literature, along with selections from contemporary writings on women's education and revolution debates that figure in the novel's background and in the charged atmosphere of the late 1790s.