Reviews of Books

In May 1810, seventeen-year-old Rachel Van Dyke of New Brunswick, New Jersey, commenced a diary in order "to improve myself in composition—to practise expressing my sentiments without difficulty in easy familiar language" (p. 26). True to her word, she wrote faithfully, extensively, and vividly, describing sermons and sociability, recording books read and lessons recited, delineating friendships and rivalries. The twenty-four-book journal that resulted testified to her attempts to extend her learning and hone her writing. It also testified to her growing intellectual and emotional involvement with her twenty-two-year-old teacher, Ebenezer Grosvenor. At Grosvenor's urging, the two exchanged journals regularly. These trades went well beyond reading, for Grosvenor commented on Van Dyke's observations, once going so far as to add entries in her voice and from her perspective. For her part, Van Dyke commented on his comments, partly for her own amusement and partly with the expectation that Grosvenor would see the diaries again. Both solo and duet, Rachel Van Dyke's journal contains her depiction of herself in her world and her ongoing conversation with Grosvenor about that world. To Read My Heart: The Journal of Rachel Van Dyke, 1810–1811, edited by Lucia McMahon and Deborah Schriver, offers a splendid and unusual view of the connections among manners, learning, and gender in the early republic.

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Van Dyke began the journal as she was leaving New Brunswick's Female Academy; writing was part of a self-conscious plan to preserve and extend the education she had acquired there. She was determined to become a woman of letters. The daughter of a prosperous merchant, Van Dyke was blessed with the leisure to pursue her interests. She read widely; her journals record the pleasures obtained in novels and poetry, the challenges presented by Virgil, and the comforts offered by German philosopher Johann Zimmerman's treatise on solitude. And she maintained an ambitious program of study, pursuing chemistry and botany on her own and rising at five to prepare for the Latin classes Grosvenor offered to a handful of local girls. She also registered the complicated affective dimension of female learning, her feelings oscillating from unbounded pride in her accomplishments and potential to frustration at women's limited educational opportunities and to uncertainty about how her ambition might figure in the world beyond her intimate circle. Van Dyke's intellectual aspirations provided the standard against which she measured her peers. She railed against young women who talked of nothing but "dress, amusements, the beaux, and such like nonsense" (p. 87). She scrutinized her closest female friends: Maria Smith, the impoverished daughter of a disgraced father, "catches at every opportunity [to] gain knowledge," while dazzling Jane Dumont, blessed with wealth and ambition, "dances up the hill of science" (p. 178) surrounded by pleasure and protected from unhappiness. But even Maria's undeniable virtue could not fully compensate for her lack of polish, and Jane's surfeit of sophistication sometimes signaled a want of sincerity. Van Dyke's extended consideration of these particular friends simultaneously defined the nature of friendship, validated female intellect, and helped articulate her own ideal self—comfortable if not wealthy, polished but not shiny.

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