The title page to "The Coquette" announces the tale as "A Novel Founded on Fact," testifying both to the novel's basis on newspaper accounts of Whitman's death, as well as the prevailing suspicion of novelistic fiction in the early Republic as potentially corrupting, especially to the female mind. However, the novel can be argued to dignify Elizabeth's character by playing down the sensationalism of the many newspaper accounts of her death, which Cathy N. Davidson has argued were "the stuff of good rumor, of gossip, of sentimental novels."