Chapter 4 Life writings

Susan C. Imbarrato

Writing about the self and writings about notable figures have long been the focus of life writings. Donald Winslow, for example, provides this definition of the term “life-writing”: “In the narrower sense this term means biography, but in general it may include autobiography as well, so that it is actually a more inclusive term than biography, even though some people may consider the word biography to include autobiographical works, letters, diaries, and the like. Life-writing has been used since the eighteenth century, although it has never been as widely current as biography and autobiography since these words came into the language.”¹ When applied to transatlantic literary studies from 1680 to 1830, in particular, the term also includes the personal narrative, such as the spiritual, captivity, slave, and travel narrative, and works as disparate as Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative The Soveraignty and Goodness of God (1682), Samuel Sewall’s Diary (1674–1729), Cotton Mather’s Diary (1681–1724), Sarah Kemble Knight’s Journal (1704), William Byrd’s Diaries (1709–41), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters (1709–62), Jonathan Edwards’s Personal Narrative (c. 1740), Elizabeth Ashbridge’s Account (1755), Samson Occom’s “A Short Narrative of My Life” (1768), John Woolman’s Journal (1774), Andrew Burnaby’s Travels…1759 and 1760 (1775), Elizabeth House Trist’s Travel Diary (1784–5), Samuel Johnson’s Letters (1731–84), Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791).

Life writings convey news, record observations, or relay experience, and may be addressed to a single recipient or to a larger, more public audience. Whether in manuscript or print, they have a unique eyewitness quality that differs from an official report or a historical overview. As the writer retells a life’s event or relates a story, there is a compelling sense of learning about the past as it unfolds in real time. Life writings thus document individual responses to a contemporary world. Family members send news of births, marriages, and deaths, along with updates on health, crops, and activities, which collectively preserve family histories. Spiritual aspirants recount emotional struggles towards conversion. Travelers describe roads, accommodations, and towns, which then aids other travelers. Captives tell of their strategies for survival. Slaves testify to the indignities of slavery and inspire a movement towards abolition. Whether from the actual sharing of life writings across the Atlantic (as with a letter or a travel account) or from their content (as in a diary, autobiography, or personal narrative), life writings clearly enhance transatlantic literary studies. This chapter will discuss the ways in which life writings were read and used, describe the influence of technology on distribution, draw attention to the existence and role of manuscript publication, and, overall, demonstrate the impact of life writings in the Atlantic world.

The diary offers periodic entries that when read as a whole provide a narrative of a life.² Samuel Sewall’s Diary, for example, records sixty-six years of family, church, and social history, with entries sometimes combining several aspects of his life. For example, in 1712, he records: “Tuesday Febr. 19. I go to Charlestown and visit Col. Phillips, who was very glad to see me. Write to Jonathan Kendal to pay 6s for his Ferryman that swore profanely Febr. 15th and would add no more charge.” He then dines with the Gerrish family, his future in-laws, to discuss his “Daughter Mary’s Portion” and after some negotiating, he reports: “Finally Febr. 20. I agreed to charge the House-Rent, and Difference of Money, and make it up £600.” In other entries, Sewall notes events in England: “Apr. 14th 1685. A Ship arrives from New Castle and brings News of the death of Charles the 2nd, and Proclamation of James the 2nd, King. Brought a couple of printed Proclamations relating to that affair”; “Satterday, Septr 25. [1686]. The Queen’s Birthday is celebrated by the Captains of the Frigots and sundry others at Noodles Iland. King and Council’s Proclamation of Novr 6. last, was published by beat of Drum throw the Town to hinder their making Bonfires in the Town however.” Other entries include notes on the weather and eclipses, a visit to England, the Salem witchcraft trials, and his unsuccessful courtship of Madam Winthrop. Throughout, Sewall illustrates Boston’s expanding influences and ongoing transatlantic exchanges.³

Cotton Mather’s writings provide another important source for transatlantic literary studies. As a chronicler of both his own life, as in his Diary, 1681–1724, and of New England history, as in his Magnalia Christi Americana (1620–98), Mather addresses major developments and events on both sides of the Atlantic. And as a Puritan minister, he often makes connections between spiritual, social, and physical health to illustrate a larger point about community. For example, in 1693, he records this entry: “In the Month of July a most pestilential Feaver, was brought among us by the Fleet coming into our Harbour from the West-Indies. It was a Distemper, which in less than a Week’s time usually carried off my Neighbours, with very direful Symptoms of turning Yellow.” Mather is soon taken ill himself and upon recovery addresses a congregation that now includes the fleet’s Admiral and Commanders: “Knowing the horrid Atheism, and Wickedness of these that were now come to bee my Hearers, I preached unto them, on Psal. 119. 59, and my God, help’d mee in it. I beleeve, t’was a Good Angel, which there struck mee sick; and by the Ministration of those good and kind Spirits, I beleeve, I was afterwards, putt upon such Methods as God blessed for the Preservation of my Health.” On a different topic altogether, Mather enters this note about the transatlantic book trade on November 5, 1713: “I am now writing for London. I would send certain little Books which have been published here, and may prove acceptable and serviceable there, unto certain Booksellers, who, if they please, may give them a new Edition. I am rather encouraged unto this, because newly, in the midst of domestic Troubles, perusing the public Prints, I find in the Advertisements, that sundry little Books of mine, have been lately reprinted at London, with Prefaces of eminent Persons to them.”⁴ For Mather, as for Sewall, the diary provides a place for social commentary, along with self-examination and personal observation.

Another keen observer of early America is William Byrd II of Westover, Virginia, who kept a diary from 1709 to 1741, in which he faithfully recorded his morning rituals and daily activities. On May 28, 1740, for example, Byrd records this entry: “I rose about 5, read Hebrew and Greek. I prayed and had coffee. I danced. The weather was still cold and clear, the wind northwest. About 7 the company went away and I wrote letters and read Latin till dinner when I ate roast mutton. After dinner I took a nap and then read more Latin. Afterwards walked about the plantation. At night talked with my people and prayed.”⁵ And so the pattern continues as Byrd rises early to read and to exercise, “I danced,” or in other entries, “I danced my dance,” and then entertains visitors, interacts with his slaves, “talked with my people,” and becomes involved in various political controversies. In entries from 1717 to 1721, known as The London Diary, Byrd chronicles his life as a widower after Lucy Parke Byrd, his first wife, died suddenly from smallpox in 1716. Having returned on business to the place of his early schooling and education, Byrd, who was in England from 1715 to 1726 and now a gentleman of means, enjoyed his London stay. For example, on January 27, 1718, Byrd makes this entry: “In the afternoon I wrote some English till 5 o’clock, and then went to Will’s Coffeehouse, and from thence to the play, where I saw a very pretty woman, Mrs. F-l-t. Then I went to Court, and from thence to Petcum’s, where was abundance of company, and I stayed till twelve and then went home in the chair and said my prayers.”⁶ Byrd also includes notes about building his extensive library that would eventually include nearly 3,000 titles. Such passages demonstrate the tension between his aristocratic aspirations and his consciousness of colonial standing, and a continuing concern with how the two locations between which he divided his life might relate. Among the many examples of eighteenth-century journals and diaries, notable Philadelphia Quaker diarists include Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker and Hannah Callender Sansom.⁷ New England midwife Martha Ballard, in turn, kept a meticulous diary that provides a fascinating medical and social narrative.⁸

The commonplace book is another valuable source for transatlantic literary study as it offers a sense of what people were reading and how literature influenced their thought. With origins in ancient Greece and Rome, a commonplace book is composed of quotes collected from other writers in prose and in verse for the purpose of education, inspiration, and memorization. Milcah Martha Moore’s commonplace book composed during the American Revolutionary era includes poetry and prose from various authors, including Philadelphians Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, and Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson whose skillful verse would have otherwise not been preserved, and which provides a valuable female perspective on transatlantic events that were currently playing out on the public stage.⁹ Thomas Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book contains prose, poetry, and dramatic verse, collected from when he was a schoolboy until the age of thirty, and includes quotes from Homer, Euripides, Herodotus, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Sterne, and Young, among others.¹⁰ Reflecting an overall spirit of inquiry and contemplation, a commonplace book thus traces a person’s or a group’s changing tastes and ongoing intellectual discoveries and interactions, which for Moore and Jefferson includes authors from classical literature to their own times, and shows how classical reference might provide a shared cultural context transcending immediate political antagonisms, as well as a discourse in which these might be addressed. From everyday observations to literary collections, the letter, diary, autobiography, journal, personal narrative, and commonplace book thus record transatlantic interactions on social, creative, and personal levels.

At times, the forms and modes of these life writings overlap. For example, Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s letterbook includes daily entries mixed in with letters that document her life in South Carolina. Esther Edwards Burr’s journal is composed of a series of letters to her friend Sarah Prince and recounts Burr’s spiritual and domestic travails. Elizabeth Ashbridge’s spiritual autobiography includes elements of the sentimental novel in a compelling account of a young woman in search of “true” religion. Janet Schaw’s journal of her travels from Scotland to the West Indies and North Carolina incorporates aspects of the travel narrative, novel, and memoir. Elizabeth House Trist kept a travel diary and wrote letters while traveling that often included several days of journal-like installments. Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography combines the spiritual, travel, and slave narrative to tell his account of a slave freed by his own entrepreneurial efforts.¹¹ Life writings also influenced fictional works in both England and America, with the earliest novels actually written in epistolary form, as in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797).¹² Daniel Defoe incorporates the captivity, spiritual, and travel narrative in Robinson Crusoe (1719). J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) combines epistolary with travel narrative, history, and fable. In Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), the letter serves as an important plot device, wherein characters compose, write, read, and receive letters. This intermixing of genres, in turn, reflects the pervasiveness of life writings as they become part of transatlantic literary and social discourse.

Among the various forms of life writing in the long eighteenth century, letters may be the most prolific, and, as such, underscore a keen desire to establish and maintain connections on both sides of the Atlantic. In this regard, when Scottish physician Dr. Alexander Hamilton emigrated to Baltimore, Maryland, and his fledgling practice suffered an extended cash-flow problem, as Elaine G. Breslaw explains, he wrote to his brother Robert in Edinburgh on June 12, 1742, with this report: “‘My first expense of household furniture, slaves, and horses, which were necessary and requisite for life in this remote wilderness and the yearly demand of Sterling Cash for medicines, the charges of housekeeping, and the slow returns of money, still keeps it out of my power to Refund my friends at home, which has often made me uneasy.’”¹³ Sarah Gray Cary of Chelsea, Massachusetts sent words of encouragement to her son, Samuel, in London on August 25, 1798: “I congratulate you upon the progress I suppose you to have made on the violin upon your passage, and shall most readily allow all your improvements when you come back, and more perhaps than you really deserve. You have a taste for music; cultivate it as much as leisure from more important business will admit. It will sweeten in your journey through the rugged path of life in many a bitter hour.”¹⁴ Letters could thus console and counsel. And while letters were initially employed by a privileged class that was both literate and influential, they eventually became the means of expression for a developing mercantile and middling class as well. For in this “Age of the Epistolary,” increased literacy generated more writers and improved technology assisted delivery. Moreover, as Sarah M. S. Pearsall points out: “In the British-Atlantic world of the eighteenth century, it is worth stressing, maintaining family connections over Atlantic distance was a luxury, not a right.”¹⁵ So that while free men and women might exchange letters to maintain their family connections, enslaved peoples were not only denied their families but also the freedom to write and send letters. The contradiction was not lost on writers Ignatius Sancho and Phillis Wheatley whose elegant letters advocated the abolition of the slave trade.¹⁶ Letters thus facilitated social discourse and had the potential to affect social change.

Letters were not only valued by their intended recipients but were also read aloud and shared with family and close acquaintances as a matter of mutual interest, if not simply news, so that eventually twenty to twenty-five people might know its contents. Letters clearly kept communities connected and informed. In fact, before regularly established postal systems, letters were often delivered by other travelers, either by private conveyance or by stage passengers, who upon arriving at a public house would leave them with the innkeeper or tavern owner. Given this common practice, some recipients even directed their letters to be delivered at the local tavern or coffeehouse. Any unclaimed letters were then listed in the newspapers and gazettes by way of notifying recipients, so in this way letters became very public. When letters and other forms of first-person narratives did make their way into print, they found a wider audience yet. It was common for travelers and explorers, for example, to keep a journal or notes that were later recopied and printed as more finished narratives intended either for family and friends or as an official report. Letters were also excerpted in newspapers and included in printed memoir and autobiography. Speeches and orations were also transcribed and printed, within early America and across the Atlantic, thus reaching even larger audiences and generating additional discussion.¹⁷ Eve Tavor Bannet’s extensive study of letters and letter-writing manuals shows that “letters were shape changers, that traveled from speech, through the ‘silent speech’ of manuscript or print, back to speech at their point of oral delivery,”¹⁸ and demonstrates how letter-writing styles and conventions served both to bind British and American political, commercial, social, and familial correspondents across the Atlantic and to inscribe burgeoning cultural differences.

In addition to writers sharing news and providing updates on family health and activities, letters from America to England often included requests for supplies, such as housewares, clothes, and books, while letters to America from Britain included queries about the demand for products in anticipation of trade. Abigaill Bilhah Levy Franks, for example, wrote from New York to her son Naphtali in London on June 21, 1741, with this request: “Pray without faill Send a Grate to burn Coall in our Little parlour. You know how Large the Chimney is and Lett that be a rule. Take care that its not too Small. Lett there be Very Little brass abouth it.” By way of reciprocation, she adds: “The Apples and other things you wrote for Cant be had Untill the faull, when I Shall take Care to Send them, and then I Intend to Send You Some preserve’d peaches, & Strawberys.”¹⁹ Esther de Berdt Reed wrote from Philadelphia to her brother Dennis de Berdt in London on December 12, 1770, with a request for several items, including: “A fine damask table-cloth, largest size, price £1 1s., and one of the next size; a very neat fan (leather mount, if it is to be had), handsome for the price, if not, paper, the sticks not very broad, the fan middling size, a guinea, or 25s.; set of dressing-boxes, the largest box in the shape of a fan, not too many in a set.”²⁰ And Elizabeth (Eliza) Farmar from Philadelphia wrote to her nephew, Jack Holroyd, an aspiring London merchant, on February 17, 1775, with this report: “Your Wine is all unsold, for there was no demand for it when it came, and the Winter coming on [Mr. Swift] wou’d not unpack it least the cold weather might hurt it, so we have not tasted it.”²¹ Farmar then elaborates on this lack of commerce in regard to the most recent Non-Importation Act passed by the First Continental Congress in September 1774: “after this month, No Tea is to be bought sold or drank. And there are Committees chosen for every Town to see that the Resolves of the Congress are stricktly observed and those that don’t are look’d on as Enemies to America.”²² Considering that letters were widely shared, it is possible that Farmar included this information as both context for the poor wine sales and because such details would have been of great interest to her relatives in England. Moreover, Eliza Farmar relates these events just five months after the Philadelphia convention, thereby reinforcing the importance of the letter as a source of news, and in this case about both trade and politics. With early America’s need for manufactured goods and Britain’s for resources, letters were certainly key components in this thriving transatlantic marketplace.

As Alexander Hamilton writes to his brother Robert, Sarah Cary to her son Samuel, Abigaill Franks to her son Naphtali, and Elizabeth Farmar to her nephew Jack, their letters also convey a strong desire to reinforce family bonds across the Atlantic divide. In a similar fashion, Susan E. Whyman observes in her study of farmers in rural England that “practical needs were not the only reasons for writing letters. All of our families needed them to meet psychological, social, and cultural needs. In a changing world marked by separation from loved ones, letters eased loneliness and supported travelers and exiles. They cemented the family ties and social networks on which everyone depended.”²³ Letters strengthened these networks for the newly emigrated British-American, as well, whose requests for goods and items and queries about family and friends kept these connections alive.

Given the growing interest in letter writing and subsequent volume in correspondence, improvements in the delivery and transportation of mail and advice in letter writing were soon to follow. The London penny post in 1680, for example, allowed for daily formal and informal correspondence.²⁴ Cost was important, especially since the receiver paid postage. The presumption of a reply, in turn, encouraged further correspondence.²⁵ For transatlantic correspondence where the average ocean crossing might take five to eight weeks, these transactions were understandably slower, so that one might expect to exchange two, maybe three letters a year. As sailing times gradually improved and delivery costs decreased, sending letters became not only more affordable but even more central to everyday and transatlantic communications. Another effect of increased correspondence was the proliferation of letter manuals, which instructed writers on the finer points of address and composition and included sample letters, from the business letter to the love letter. In doing so, they reinforced a shared community of letter writing and encouraged new writers as well, so that letters were exchanged from aristocratic circles to the middling classes, including the correspondence of farmers, merchants, and servants, from rural England to the city of London. Several recent studies by Eve Tavor Bannet, Susan E. Whyman, Temma Berg, Elizabeth Hewitt, and Clare Brant address these widening epistolary circles and show how letters and letter-writing manuals in England and America allowed for middling classes to enter the literary-social conversation, which potentially improved their chances in the economic marketplace.²⁶ Konstantin Dierks, in turn, discusses the potential for social agency along with class issues in letter writing.²⁷ Moreover, as spelling was largely phonetic and neither spelling nor punctuation was systemized, letter manuals along with the dictionaries of Samuel Johnson and Daniel Webster offered guidance and brought some uniformity into written discourse, making it possible for more people from a wider range of social classes to participate in this epistolary exchange.

In addition to matters of conveyance, instruction, and distribution, the study of life writings has gone through several stages regarding theoretical and methodical approaches. From their classical beginnings, the life writings of prominent figures have most often been recorded and their styles, consequently, emulated.²⁸ As a result, an emphasis on the lives of notable persons as role models persisted into the long eighteenth century from Cotton Mather to Samuel Johnson, wherein the author provided guidance and instruction. Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes note: “The venerable notion that history is the collected biographies of admirable or notorious individuals and that the way to understand shared social experience is by studying a ‘representative’ prominent life are philosophically and historically problematic.”²⁹ Rather than focusing on any one individual as representative, therefore, life writings appreciate an individual’s view of society. Similar questioning has led to an interest in life writings by more diverse authors, such as Ashbridge and Equiano, whose texts invite discussion of their social and historical contexts, for which New Historicism, for example, is well suited as a theoretical approach. Along these lines, Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven note that epistolary studies have moved “away from thematic and structuralist criticism and toward meticulous cultural historicization: the epistolary generic contract is always revised in the light of changing historical contexts.”³⁰ Jeffrey H. Richards concurs with this direction, as he suggests: “Rather than see letters as historical documents only, something to mine for information or ethnographic or biographical detail, both editors and readers do well to see them also as situated documents, texts growing out of a complex of cultural and technological practices as well as the mind and experience of a writer.”³¹ In this way, we begin to understand the writer’s world and to consider how social issues, including class and gender, affect identity and perspective. In that the term “life writings” has long been considered an inclusive term, it has been adopted readily within the discourses of gender and cultural studies. Life writings are thus an important resource in the study and recovering of voices as yet underrepresented. In this regard, Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris find that: “As scholars seek to recover and find new ways to make meaning of the full range of women’s, working class, and people of color’s writings, the field of the epistolary can only become a more and more significant terrain of inquiry.”³² With their varied authorship, letters are a key component in transatlantic literary studies as they embody a continuing dimension of interaction between literate emigrants and their British correspondents, which effectively supplements the public narratives of politics and printed literature.

Including images of a manuscript letter, journal, diary, or personal narrative in a printed edition brings attention to these different voices while also illustrating several issues surrounding editorial practices. For example, when reading the manuscript version of Eliza Farmar’s letter from February 17, 1775, words are not only written close together on the page to save paper, but appear linked together as if she were writing quickly before her pen point dulled and while the ink still flowed. Moreover, without modernized spelling or punctuation, Farmar’s manuscript letter suggests impatience, if not anxiety at the vicissitudes of time and distance:

I wrote you & Capt Welsh a very long letter by Capt Airis Sept 19 and another Nov 1^st by Mr. Watkins and your Unkle wrote 18 of October by Capt Van Horn but have not had one line from you tho we have had five or Six Ship from London. Your last to me was the 30 June and that to your Unkle 17 of Augt so it is six months from the last. You must think it would make me very unhappy as so many Vessles have arived not to hear from you unless you have forgot me and think I have done the same by you but that is not the case with me for I have had a great many uneasy thoughts on your account fearing you might be Ill or dead.³³

With these long sentences, Farmar’s words run together, which heightens the sense of urgency and expresses a rapid-fire style. By contrast, a modernized transcription with regularized spelling and added punctuation suggests a more measured response:

I wrote you and Captain Welsh a very long letter by Captain Ayres September 19th and another November 1st by Mr. Watkins, and your Unkle wrote 18th of October by Captain Van Horn, but have not had one line from you, though we have had five or Six Ship from London. Your last to me was the 30th June and that to your Unkle 17th of August, so it is six months from the last. You must think it would make me very unhappy as so many Vessels have arrived not to hear from you, unless you have forgot me, and think I have done the same by you. But that is not the case with me, for I have had a great many uneasy thoughts on your account fearing you might be Ill or dead.³⁴

From this comparison, what might be interpreted as a matter of state of mind might in fact be more a matter of writing supplies. For as Harriet Stryker-Rodda notes, some writers “may have found that the way to save time was to keep the pen on the paper, moving from word to word as rapidly as possible while the ink lasted on the pen. Some hung all their words together like beads on a string, as long as the ink held out.”³⁵ In working with archival materials, therefore, becoming familiar with the material aspects of life writings is important. Noting the different types of paper, pen, and ink, for example, helps to understand the conditions of writing itself and how they may have affected handwriting, style, and composition.

To further assist with recovery and to bring these life writings into print, it would be helpful to improve access to archival material so that information about lesser-known writers might be more readily available, especially when the sole source of information may only be a letter, personal narrative, or diary. For unless working with a well-known figure whose extensive family papers are largely intact, such as Abigail Adams, Samuel Johnson, or Thomas Jefferson, providing textual notes for persons, places, and events in order to situate the writing within a larger context can be difficult. Tracking names of acquaintances and business contacts is one way to recreate a sense of the writer’s community, and though references may initially seem obscure, their repetition and subsequent cross-referencing helps to unfold networks within a correspondence or narrative that reveal a lively, interconnected community, as we learn of births, marriages, deaths, financial transactions, and political and social intrigues that by association supplement the text. When a correspondence spans many years, a biographical portrait emerges from these writings themselves. Still, information from genealogical records and family histories can be problematic, if not simply limited. And even though background about notable male authors is generally accessible and documented, tracing the matrilineal family line has proven more difficult, which is not unusual in that locating women’s writings often involves searching through family papers catalogued under a father’s or husband’s name. Working from manuscript sources is essential when transcribing these materials, and with greater access we would be able to uncover even more life writings from the earlier periods for transatlantic study.

Printed editions of archived letters and diaries present another set of challenges, as editors may have altered style and punctuation to conform to the conventions of the day and omitted contents that proved objectionable or sensitive to the family. And while there is a certain delight in the archived manuscript, there is also a desire to provide access to these writings so that they may be read, appreciated, and studied as literary and historical documents. Along these lines, Jeffrey H. Richards discusses editing practices related to the Mercy Otis Warren letters, co-edited with Sharon M. Harris, and notes: “Writing letters, like editing them later, involves a series of choices related to materials, transportation, handwriting, epistolary style, diction, spelling and punctuational practice, and external influences (like contemporary typography).”³⁶ Although there may be hesitation to alter the unique characteristics of a handwritten manuscript, we hopefully find a balance between modernizing for accessibility and retaining the expressiveness and flavor of the text by minimizing alterations. These are just some of the challenges in working with archival life writings and the concerns involved in the process of bringing them into print.

Life writings invigorated transatlantic communications throughout the long eighteenth century. A desire to know how life might be different in another place and how life continued at home motivated writers on both sides of the Atlantic. As key resources for transatlantic literary study, life writings offer a myriad of voices. Expectation and reality intertwine as letters, diaries, journals, and narratives relay experiences and describe discoveries. The very acts of traveling, emigrating, and settling, moreover, found a most appropriate vehicle in life writings, as people told tales and shared news that were sure to excite and comfort those left behind. From these writings, we have a rich source for studying and teaching that reveals the everyday needs and concerns of people who ventured out and explored and whose writings crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic.

NOTES

1 Donald J. Winslow, Life-Writing: A Glossary of Terms in Biography, Autobiography, and Related Forms (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980), p. 25. The poet-critic Robert Southey is generally associated with the term’s first critical references in an 1809 issue of the Quarterly Review.

2 See Steven E. Kagel, American Diary Literature, 1620–1799 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979); Dan Doll and Jessica Munns (eds.), Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Diary and Journal (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006).

3 Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. Milton H. Thomas, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973), II: 679; I: 60, 122.

4 Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 2 vols. (New York: Ungar, 1957), I: 166–67; II: 260.

5 Byrd’s diaries were originally written in shorthand and not deciphered and published until 1941. William Byrd, Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739–1741, With Letters & Literary Exercises 1696–1726, ed. Maude H. Woodfin (Richmond, VA: Dietz Press, 1942), p. 70.

6 William Byrd, The London Diary (1717–1721) and Other Writings, ed. Marion Tinling and Louis B. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 71.

7 See The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom: Sense and Sensibility in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Susan E. Klepp and Karin A. Wulf (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); and The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker: The Life Cycle of an Eighteenth-Century Woman, ed. Elaine F. Crane (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1994). Quakers were avid chroniclers, often keeping records of their extensive travels as they preached and ministered.

8 See Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990).

9 Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America, ed. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).

10 Thomas Jefferson, “Of the 407 entries, 339 are poetry, and of 41 authors represented, 35 are poets.” Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 11.

11 Eliza Pinckney, Elise Pinckney, and Marvin R. Zahniser, The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997); Elizabeth Ashbridge, Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge (1755), ed. Daniel B. Shea, in Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives, ed. William L. Andrews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 117–180; Evangeline W. Andrews and Charles M. L. Andrews, Journal of a Lady of Quality (Schaw) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). For Schaw, see also Eve Tavor Bannet, “Trading Routes and Eighteenth-Century Migrations: Reframing Janet Schaw,” in Recording and Reordering, pp. 137–57; and Dan Doll, “‘Like Trying to Fit a Sponge into a Matchbox’: Twentieth-Century Editing of Eighteenth-Century Journals,” in Recording and Reordering, pp. 211–28; Trist, The Travel Diary of Elizabeth House Trist: Philadelphia to Natchez, 1783–84, ed. Annette Kolodny, in Journeys in New Worlds, pp. 201–32; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (1789), ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2003); and Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005).

12 Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

13 Elaine G. Breslaw, Dr. Alexander Hamilton and Provincial America: Expanding the Orbit of Scottish Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), p. 100.

14 Cary, “Sarah Gray Cary, Letters from Grenada, West Indies and Chelsea, Massachusetts, 1779–1824,” in Women Writing Home, 1700–1920: Female Correspondence across the British Empire, vol. VI: USA, ed. Susan C. Imbarrato (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006), pp. 3–73 (p. 51).

15 Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 43.

16 See Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1998); Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2001). Also see Philip H. Round, “Neither Here Nor There: Transatlantic Epistolarity in Early America,” in A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America, ed. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

17 Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

18 Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 314. See also Bannet (ed.), British and American Letter Manuals, 1680–1810, 4 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008).

19 Abigaill Franks, The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 1733–1748, ed. Edith B. Gelles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 93.

20 Esther de Berdt Reed, “Esther de Berdt Reed, Letters from Philadelphia, 1771–80,” in Women Writing Home, VI: 163–90, 165.

21 Elizabeth Farmar, “Elizabeth (Eliza) Farmar, Letters from Philadelphia, 1774–89,” in Women Writing Home, VI: 75–107, 82.

22 Ibid., pp. 82–83.

23 Susan E. Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 108.

24 Robert Adams Day, Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction Before Richardson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966); James How, Epistolary Spaces: English Letter-Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s “Clarissa” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

25 Barbara Maria Zaczek, Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997); Leon Jackson, The Business of Letters: Authorial Economies in Antebellum America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

26 Bannet, Empire of Letters; Whyman, The Pen and the People; Temma Berg, The Lives and Letters of an Eighteenth-Century Circle of Acquaintance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

27 Konstantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

28 For example, the letters of Cicero (40s BC), St. Augustine’s Confessions (c. 400), Michel Eyquem de Montaigne’s Essais (1580), and Francis Bacon’s Essays (1597).

29 Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes (eds.), Teaching Life Writing Texts (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008), p. 3.

30 Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven (eds.), Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 10.

31 Jeffrey H. Richards, “Authorship, Network, Textuality: Editing Mercy Otis Warren’s Letters,” in Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760–1860, ed. Theresa Strouth Gaul and Sharon M. Harris (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 236. See also Warren, Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards and Sharon M. Harris (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

32 Gaul and Harris (eds.), Letters and Cultural Transformations, p. 12.

33 Farmar, “Eliza Farmar Letterbook,” The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, (Am.063).

34 Farmar, “Letters,” Women Writing Home, VI: 82.

35 Harriet Stryker-Rodda, Understanding Colonial Handwriting (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1986), p. 17. Also see Susan M. Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

36 Richards, “Authorship,” p. 236; Doll, “‘Like Trying to Fit a Sponge into a Matchbox.’”