A Passionate Usefulness: The Life and Literary Labors of Hannah Adams

by Gary D. Schmidt

Overview

In a literary environment dominated by men, the first American to earn a living as a writer and to establish a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic was, miraculously, a woman. Hannah Adams dared to enter—and in some ways was forced to enter—a sphere of literature that had, in eighteenth-century America, been solely a male province. Driven by poverty and necessity, and aided by an extraordinarily adept mind and keen sense of business, Adams authored works on New England history, sectarian history, and Jewish history, using and citing the most recent scholarly works being published in Great Britain and America. As a female writer, she would always remain something of an outsider, but her accomplishments did not by any means go unrecognized: embraced by the Boston intelligentsia and highly regarded throughout New England, Adams came to epitomize the possibility in a democratic society that anyone could rise to a circle of intellectual elites.

In A Passionate Usefulness, the first book-length biography of this remarkable figure, Gary Schmidt focuses primarily on the intimate connection between Adams’s reading and her own literary work. Hers is the story of incipient scholarship in the new nation, the story of a dependence that evolved into intellectual independence. Schmidt sets Adams’s works in the context of her early poverty and desperate family situation, her decade-long feud with one of New England’s most powerful Calvinist ministers, her alliance with the budding Unitarian movement in Boston, and her work establishing the first evangelical mission to Palestine (a task she accomplished virtually single-handedly).

Today Adams still holds a place not only as a female writer who made her way economically in the book business before any other woman—or male writer—could do so, but also as a key figure in the transitional generation between the American Revolution and the Renaissance upon whose groundwork much of the country’s later literature would build.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813922720
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	06/04/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.25(d)

About the Author

Gary Schmidt is Professor of English at Calvin College and the coauthor, with Carol Winters, of Edging the Boundaries of Children’s Literature.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
	Prologue: "A Memory to be Kept Green"	1
	The Solitude of the Reader
1	"With Gloomy Prospects Before Me"	15
2	"The Strength and Vivacity of Her Understanding"	23
3	An Alphabetical Compendium	31
4	"Gloomy in My Situation"	41
5	"The Benefit of His Patronage"	48
6	A View of Religions	56
	The Historian of New England
7	"Efforts of a Female Pen"	67
8	"Obliged to Lay Aside Reading"	76
9	A Summary History of New-England	81
10	"Ancient Histories of New-England"	89
11	"Modern Information"	96
12	"Truth and the Facts of History"	105
	Proving Faith
13	A New View of Religions	113
14	The Truth and Excellence of the Christian Religion Exhibited	125
15	"Avowing Her Firm Belief"	132
	Comfort--and Discomfort--in Society
16	"To Make Some New Acquaintance"	141
17	"Ruinous Competition"	154
18	Abridgement of the History of New-England	165
19	"Her Alluring and Powerful Assistance"	174
20	"Corrections and Additions"	183
21	"The Parties in This Controversy"	188
22	"Business Out of the Female Line"	199
23	"I Wish to Learn the Truth of This Report"	207
24	"The Undefined Nature of the Claims"	217
	The Writer as Activist Historian
25	"I Shall Avail Myself of the Information"	225
26	The History of the Jews	237
27	"The Exact Fulfillment"	245
28	"Any Written Communication"	254
29	"The Amount of Compensation"	261
30	The "Painful Affair" Ended	267
	The Writer's New Purposes
31	"I Know I Am Very Awkward"	279
32	A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations	290
33	"Attention Awakened"	299
34	"You Are at the Head Quarters"	311
35	Letters on the Gospels	320
36	"Not Alone in Her Exertions"	331
37	"Affection Fervent and Enthusiastic"	343
38	A Memoir of Miss Hannah Adams	348
39	"Willing to Remain"	355
	Notes	361
	Bibliography	431
	Index	443