| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Life and Times of Martha Laurens Ramsay, 1759–1811. By Joanna Bowen Gillespie. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. xxx, 315 pp. $34.95, ISBN 1-57003-373-0.)

In The Life and Times of Martha Laurens Ramsey, Joanna Bowen Gillespie relies on the autobiographical Memoirs of the Life of Martha Laurens Ramsay, along with other family letters and documents, as the basis for her biography of Martha Ramsay. The Memoirs, a selection of Ramsay's diary entries and other miscellaneous writings, were edited and first published by Dr. David Ramsay, her husband, three years after her death in 1811. Gillespie argues that Ramsay's significance derives from her "conscious determination to shape her life around a formal religious covenant." Such a radical, "unique expression of individualism for an eighteenth-century woman . . . was a remarkable act." 1

Gillespie does a laudable job of placing Ramsay's life, which moved from Charleston, South Carolina, to England, to Vigan, France, and back to England before returning to South Carolina, into context. The daughter of the prominent Charleston merchant Henry Laurens, Martha was born into a life of social and financial privilege but personal deprivation, especially after her mother died. Sent to live with an aunt and uncle, Martha received an excellent education and was an exhaustive reader, especially of religious and theological texts, which she used to create her covenant. . . .

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