Esther Edwards Burr

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Esther Edwards Burr (born February 13, 1732 in Northampton , Massachusetts ; died April 7, 1758 in Princeton , New Jersey ) was the daughter of Jonathan Edwards , the most famous American theologian of his day, wife of Aaron Burr, Sr. , des President of the College of New Jersey and mother of Aaron Burr, Jr. , later Vice President of the United States. Her diary , which she kept from 1754 to 1757, is of interest to American history and literature .

Life

Esther Edwards was the third oldest of the eleven children of Jonathan Edwards and his wife Sarah Pierrepont and grew up in the Northampton parish, where her father held the parish until 1750. After a falling out with the community, the family moved to the Frontier settlement of Stockbridge in western Massachusetts in 1751 . In 1752 she married the Presbyterian clergyman Aaron Burr, president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University ) and, as his wife, had not only domestic but also numerous representative duties. She died in 1758, a year after her husband's death and just a month after the death of her father, who had come to Princeton to succeed Burr as president of the college.

Her diaries, published for the first time in 1901, are of importance to American history and literary studies. They provide numerous insights into life in the late colonial period and are at the same time a testimony to her literary ambitions. Like the earlier Journal of Sarah Kemble Knight is of particular interest to women's and gender studies, as it is one of the few written by women Documents of this kind from the colonial period. The majority of her journal is not a diary in the sense of a purely private self-testimony, but rather as correspondence with another diary writer, her childhood friend Sarah Prince in Boston, always apostrophized in the journal as "Fidelia"; Prince's replies were to "Burrissa".

Editions of the diary

  • Jeremiah Eames Rankin (Ed.): Esther Burr's Journal. Howard University Print, Washington, DC 1901 ( digitized ).
  • Carol F Karlsen, Laurie Crumpacker (Eds.): The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754-1757. Yale University Press, New Haven 1984, ISBN 0-300-03750-3 .

Secondary literature

personal data
SURNAME Burr, Esther Edwards
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Diary writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 13, 1732
PLACE OF BIRTH Northampton , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1758
Place of death Princeton , New Jersey