Sarah Kemble Knight

Sarah Kemble Knight (born April 19, 1666 in Boston , Massachusetts Bay Colony ; died December 25, 1727 near Norwalk , Colony of Connecticut ) was a business woman in the New England colony , best known for her diaries , which are an important historical document of American literary and cultural history.

Life

She was born into a middle-class family to the Boston trader Thomas Kemble and his wife. She married the ship's captain Richard Knight. After his death (probably around 1703) she worked as a teacher, trader, broker, landlady and business consultant to support her family. In 1706 she opened a school in Boston; Samuel Mather, possibly Benjamin Franklin, was among her students . In 1713 she settled in Norwalk, where she came into conflict with the law for selling liquor to Indians.

In 1825 a fragment of her diary about a business trip undertaken in 1704 from Boston via New Haven to New York was first printed, edited by Theodore Dwight . It has been reprinted many times since then; the original manuscript edited by Dwight is lost today. George Parker Winship, the editor of a reprint published in 1920, ruled that Knight's diary was the "truest reflection" of New England colonial society that has survived. While Knight's contemporaries were still strongly influenced by the Puritan ethos, Knight's report is humorous.

In the episodic diary entries she reports on the imponderables of the journey on foot and on horseback, also on the difficulties that she had to face as a woman traveling alone, encounters with companions, New England settlers and Indians, and thus provides an insight into the customs and traditions the colonial society. Since, unlike the learned writings of the time, she also recorded the everyday language of the colonists, her diary is also of interest to linguists.

Text output

• The Journal of Madam Knight. In: Perry Miller , Thomas H. Johnson (Eds.): The Puritans. American Book Company, New York NY et al. a. 1938, E-Text .
• The Journal of Madam Knight. With an introductory note by George Parker Winship. Small, Maynard & Co., Boston MA 1920.
• Malcolm Freiberg (Ed.): The Journal of Madam Knight. David R. Godine, Boston MA 1972, ISBN 0-87923-044-4 .
• The Journal of Madam Knight. In: William L. Andrews (Ed.): Journeys in New Worlds. Early American Women's Narratives. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI 1990, ISBN 0-299-12584-X (with annotations by Sargent Bush, Jr.).

Secondary literature

• Mary McAleer Balkun: Sarah Kemble Knight and the Construction of the American Self. In: Women's Studies , Volume 28, No. 1, 1998, pp. 7-27, doi: 10.1080 / 00497878.1998.9979242 .
• Sargent Bush, Jr .: Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-1727). In: Legacy , Vol. 12, No. 2, 1995, ISSN  0748-4321 , pp. 112-120, JSTOR 25679166 .
• Peter Kratzke: Sarah Kemble Knight's Polemical Landscape. In: The CEA Critic. Volume 65, No. 3, 2003, ISSN  0007-8069 , pp. 43-49.
• Alan Margolies: The Editing and Publication of "The Journal of Madam Knight". In: The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Vol. 58, No. 1, 1964, pp. 25-32, JSTOR 24300738
• Peter Thorpe: Sarah Kemble Knight and the Picaresque Tradition. In: College Language Association Journal. Volume 10, 1966, ISSN  0007-8549 , pp. 114-121.