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.
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