Daughter of Boston : the extraordinary diary of a nineteenth-century woman
Boston was well-known in the nineteenth century as a center for intellectual ferment. Amidst the popular lecturing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the discussion groups led by Margaret Fuller sat a remarkable young woman, Caroline Healey Dall (1822-1912): transcendentalist, early feminist, writer, reformer, and, perhaps most importantly, active diarist. During the seventy-five years that Dall kept a diary, she captured all the fascinating details of her sometimes agonizing personal life, and she also wrote about all the major figures who surrounded her. Her diary, filling forty-five volumes, is perhaps the longest diary ever written by any American and the most complete account of a nineteenth-century woman"s life. Daughter of Boston is a selection of the best from Dall"s diary, woven together with biographical narrative. What Samuel Pepys did in his Diary for seventeenth-century London, Caroline Dall does in hers for nineteenth-century Boston. The city"s celebrations, mob scenes, poverty-ridden neighborhoods, lectures, and exhibits are described with great wit and insight. Dall also writes colorfully about people whose names never made it into the history books--wives and mothers, fugitives, servants, children, and working people of all ages. Daughter of Boston is both a significant document of social history and an engrossing account of one woman"s life and thoughts
Diary
xxxiii, 452 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780807050347, 9780807050354, 0807050342, 0807050350
60373291
Aspiring to something noble: March 19, 1838-April 27, 1840
The Transcendentalist circle: August 7, 1840-November 4, 1841
From heiress apparent to independent woman: November 10, 1841-September 8, 1842
To the South and back: September 10, 1842-April 10, 1844
The minister's wife: September 24, 1844-March 15, 1847
The Needham years: June 3, 1847-December 30, 1849
A city simmers: March 24, 1850-April 28, 1851
A Yankee in Canada: May 8, 1851-September 2, 1853
Tribulations: October 10, 1853-October 17, 1854
In search of a new identity: October 22, 1854-November 25, 1857
Woman's rights woman: January 6, 1858-February 19, 1861
Wars, public and private: April 14, 1861-September 9, 1865