A Girl's Life Eighty Years Ago

A Girl's Life Eighty Years Ago

"A Girl's Life Eighty Years Ago" is a collection of the private letters of Eliza Southgate Bowne (1783–1809), a young woman of Scarborough, Maine, assembled and introduced by Clarence Cook, with editorial framing supplied by her granddaughter's transcriptions and family record. The introduction establishes Eliza's lineage—daughter of Judge Robert Southgate and Mary King Southgate, niece of the statesman Rufus King, and cousin to the Longfellow family through the Wadsworths—and argues for the letters' value as an unselfconscious, vivid record of genteel New England and New York life at the turn of the nineteenth century, superior in its eyes to formal memoirs because it captures "the living voice of the writer." The book itself is not a narrated biography but the letters in sequence, forming an informal autobiography. It opens with Eliza as a homesick but dutiful fourteen-year-old boarding-school pupil at Medford, first under the unhappy Mrs. Wyman and then under the beloved Mrs. Rowson, writing stiff, formal letters to her "honored parents" that gradually loosen into her characteristic wit as she matures. These early letters cover arithmetic and geometry lessons, French and dancing instruction, homesickness, requests for clothing and pocket money, and dutiful expressions of filial gratitude typical of the era's epistolary conventions. As Eliza grows older, the correspondence shifts to lively accounts of Portland assemblies, balls, sleighing mishaps, flirtations, and the social rituals of courtship—most memorably a chaotic snowstorm night after an Assembly ball, and a comic account of a card game (Loo) interrupted by her eagerness to read a letter in her pocket. A substantial and celebrated portion of the book consists of her correspondence with her cousin Moses Porter, an ongoing debate over the education and capacities of women. Eliza argues wittily but seriously against the era's assumption that women's minds are unfit for cultivation, defending female intellect while accepting the social constraints of her sex with irony and resignation; she reflects on marriage as often founded on gratitude rather than love, and on the unequal privilege by which women may only refuse suitors, never choose them. This correspondence ends abruptly with Porter's sudden death from yellow fever in 1802, reported in a brief, moving letter from Eliza's father to Rufus King. The narrative's high point is Eliza's 1802 tour with her friends Mr. and Mrs. Hasket Derby—first to their splendid estate near Salem, described in ecstatic detail (gardens, hermitage, moonlit terraces), then on an extended journey through New England and New York to the fashionable spa resorts of Ballston and Saratoga Springs. Her journal-letters from this trip record encounters with prominent society figures (the Van Rensselaers, the Livingstons, Aaron Burr's daughter Theodosia, General Knox, General Pinckney), scenic wonders such as Glens Falls and Lake George, and the fashionable dissipation of spa life. It is at Ballston that she meets Walter Bowne, a New York merchant, whose serious, attentive courtship she narrates with candor, including her own uncertainty and her careful deference to her parents' approval before permitting his addresses. The final letters trace Eliza's swift engagement, her earnest letter asking her mother's blessing, and her marriage to Walter Bowne in 1803. The newlyweds' journey to New York is recounted with the same delighted, detailed observation—New Haven, the Battery, Broadway, Columbia Garden's lamplit fêtes, sittings for a portrait by the miniaturist Edward Malbone, and her warm reception into Bowne's large Quaker family and into the social circle of her now-famous uncle Rufus King, freshly returned from his ambassadorship in London amid the excitement of renewed war with France. Throughout, Eliza's letters register her wonder at New York's fashions, gardens, and society, alongside repeated expressions of grateful, almost disbelieving happiness in her marriage. The published letters end at this high point of youthful contentment, though the introduction discloses the sequel the letters themselves do not reach: two children, Walter and Mary, and Eliza's own death in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1809 at only twenty-five, following a failed voyage undertaken to restore her health after childbirth—her husband arriving too late to see her again. The editor frames the whole collection as a portrait, in Eliza's own unstudied words, of a "spirited," generous, witty young woman whose brief life closed in tragedy but whose letters preserve, with a novelist's vividness, both her individual character and the vanished texture of Federal-era American domestic and fashionable life.

By Eliza Southgate Bowne · First published 1887 · Genre: Epistolary Literature, Personal Memoir, Diary and Journal · 77,539 words

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_The Riverside Press, Cambridge_: Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

INTRODUCTION.

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memoir · letters · diary · autobiography · historical · 19th-century · women's-history · coming-of-age · family-life · courtship · social-customs · personal-narrative

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A Girl's Life Eighty Years Ago is listed on Textopian as a historical account by Eliza Southgate Bowne, dated 1887 CE.

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