The Journal and Occasional Writings of Sarah Wister (review)

Book Reviews123 INDIANA YEARLY MEETING RECORDS Indiana Yearly Meeting records, formerly in the vault at the First Friends Meeting House in Richmond, are now deposited in care of the Earlham College archives. Book Reviews Edited by Edwin B. Bronner The Journal and Occasional Writings ofSarah Wister. Edited, with an introduction , by Kathryn Zabelle Derounian. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. 149 pp. $26.50. This scholarly edition of Sarah Wister's journal and writings represents a promise kept. University presses acknowledged a decade ago that there had been a shocking neglect of American women writers before 1800 and that they would rectify it with dispatch. Quaker women's occasional writings form a significant portion of those neglected texts because Quaker families educated their daughters and encouraged habits of self-examination and journal keeping . While this explains Sarah Wister's later writings, we are privy to a more immediate crisis in the sixteen-year-old Sarah's life in the late summer of 1777 when she began her first journal. Exiled by war from Philadelphia to the Foulke farmstead in Pennlyn, Sarah faced an unforeseen shortage in paper for writing to her best friends, Rebeccah Norris and Sarah Jones (a cousin). So Sarah poured out into her journal intimacies for sharing with friends, of an uninhibitively temporal nature. Only with the years, beginning June 9, 1796 when Sarah had reached her forties, do her journal writings describe her spiritual condition. These two journals and Wister's poetry and brief prose writings provide , then, a varied and balanced view of an eighteenth century Quaker woman's life. Only the youthful journal has been previously published, and then incompletely , or without a scholarly apparatus. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian provides a valuable introduction and a thorough scholarly edition of Wister's writings in this volume. She traces the history of the manuscripts and places Wister's writings in the context of writing by her Quaker family and friends. While the youthful Sarah Wister was witness to great events, and was in her later years a friend and confidante of Benjamin Rush, the editor does not inflate her importance. Derounian prefers to let this voice, with its engaging freshness, speak across two centuries on its own terms. We learn that the scarcity of paper meant even an interruption in the journal itself in the early spring of 1778, but by May 11th "the scene begins to brighten and I will continue my nonsense," p. 59. That is all to the reader's benefit because that day about sixteen hundred men under General Maxwell passed by the road, so everyone left tea. Captain Cadwallader Jones stopped in and Sarah admits, "if I was not invincible I must have fallen victim to this mans (sic!) inelegancies," p. 59. Fortunately for the Wister family and officers billeted at the Foulke farmstead, the winter of 77-78 had been merely dull, not life-threatening, but Sarah Wister knew of Washington's troops at Valley Forge and about the battle of Germantown. She comments on the British evacuation 124Quaker History of Philadelphia with pleasure and, as a patriot, upon Benedict Arnold's switch in allegiance with vehement disapproval. In poetry, informal lines to the much admired Lafayette probably composed before she was twenty, Sarah Wister's spiritual values inform her temporal concerns even while she is caught up in the excitement of the War for Independence: May my dear Country, on her exiles shine And this fair Land, be well exchang'd for thine Till that great Pow'r whom warring hosts obey Shall with the wheel of time, roll on the day When discord fierce, and anarchy shall cease And warring Nations, join in bonds of peace. (p. 106) Sarah Wister's writing disclose a young woman very much of this world but determined to bring the light of her values to bear upon the events of her time. And she longs for peace in her world. We owe a debt of gratitude to Kathryn Zabelle Derounian and the Associated University Presses for making this voice accessible to us today. Haverford CollegeSusan Mosher Stuard Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women 1750-1850. By Joan M. Jensen. New...