10% off all books and free delivery over £40
Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.

A Passionate Usefulness

View All Editions

The selected edition of this book is not available to buy right now.
Add To Wishlist
Write A Review

About

A Passionate Usefulness Synopsis

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.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9780813922720
Publication date: 30th June 2004
Author: Gary D Schmidt
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Format: Hardback
Pagination: 454 pages
Genres: Biography: general
Literary studies: general