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The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom: Sense and Sensibility in the Age of the American Revolution. Edited by Susan E. Klepp and Karin Wulf. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. xiii + 358 pp. $78.95 cloth/$24.95 paper.
Early American women's diaries often present a challenge to unsuspecting contemporary readers. Contrary to expectations, their authors did not typically view diaries as places to confess their innermost feelings about their mundane lives, nor did they tend to include detailed descriptions and narratives. Rather, these diaries operated more as a record of transactions and occurrences; they are repetitious, spare, and rife with casual references to now unfamiliar people, habits, events, and places.
In editing Hannah Callender Sansom's eighteenth-century diary, Susan E. Klepp and Karin Wulf, like Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Elaine Forman Crane, and others before them, have alleviated many of the challenges that early American manuscripts and reprints present to readers. HCS, as the editors term her, was from a well-off Philadelphia family and a member of the Society of Friends. She began her diary in Ianuary 1758, at the age of twenty, and made her last entry in November 1788. These three decades span her years as an eligible unmarried woman; her courtship; the birth of her five children; the deaths of friends and family, including her youngest daughter; the marriage of her eldest daughter; and the birth of her first grandchild. For long stretches, she made daily entries-some only a single word in length, others (mainly documenting travel) as long as several pages, and the vast majority about a paragraph-but she also put aside her diary for years at a time,...