Daughter Of Boston

In nineteenth-century Boston, 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 running diary ever written by any American and the most complete account of a nineteenth-century woman's life.

In Daughter of Boston, scholar Helen Deese has painstakingly combed through these diaries and created a single fascinating volume of Dall's observations, judgments, descriptions, and reactions.

Helen R. Deese is the Caroline Healey Dall editor for the Massachusetts Historical Society. She lives in Flint and Ann Arbor, Michigan.