The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom: Sense and Sensibility in the Age of the American Revolution (review)

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 January 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, as family sickness, motherhood, and war disrupted her ability and desire to maintain it. The editors provide the diary in its entirety and include discussions and documentation of the substantive gaps and silences.

Much of what HCS records are the quotidian rounds of visits she made among her circle of Philadelphia Friends. The list of names, many of which are shared by multiple people (she knows a number of Catys, Joseys, and Sallys, not to mention Morrises and Smiths), can make for tedious reading. Yet it is precisely this intricate exchange and its evolution during thirty years that is the primary focus of the editors’ discussion. Dividing the diary into three sections and foregrounding each section with a thematic chapter that lucidly contextualizes and analyzes the coming set of entries, Klepp and Wulf argue that “a move from sociability toward an embrace of sensibility shaped her diary” (2). The editors place this diary squarely within the conversation around sensibility in Revolutionary America that has been furthered by the work of scholars such as Julie Ellison (in Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion), Sarah Knott (in Sensibility and the American Revolution), and Nicole Eustace (in Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution).

The book’s first section (1758–1761) encompasses Callender’s single years, and the thematic chapter crucially defamiliarizes the purposes of friendship and talk. In this section, according to the editors, sociability predominates, an assertion supported by the subsequent chapter, whose one hundred or so pages of diary entries catalog Callender’s daily visits. Her diary attests to the central role woman played in the performance of community by documenting the persistent heterosocial circulation of bodies and conversation.

The second section (1762–1772) intermittently chronicles Callender’s courtship and first decade of her marriage to Samuel Sansom. The editors frame this section as something of a contest between sociability and sensibility. Citing the popularity of sentimental novels, Klepp and Wulf argue that Callender’s decision to enter into an “eminently sensible marriage with her wealthy neighbor” at the behest of her father was not a foregone conclusion (162). These entries have a performative aspect to them, as the diarist appears to be convincing herself that she, too, was “entitled to a small Share” of marital happiness (172). They mark her privileged race and class and provide a counterpoint to...