| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Most Learned Woman in America: A Life of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson. By Anne M. Ousterhout. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. xx, 391 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-271-02311-2.)
In a search for a biographer, documents concerning Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, the eighteenth-century scholar and writer, were published in 1915 (Simon Gratz, "Some Materials for a Biography of Mrs. Elizabeth Fergusson, née Graeme," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1915, pp. 257–321, 385–409). Since then women have gotten the vote, women's history has evolved from the heroic to the theoretical, and the literary canon has expanded to include female authors and critics. But Graeme Fergusson was ignored.	1
Only at the end of the century did the late Anne M. Ousterhout take up the challenge of this unusual woman: a master of classical and modern languages, a published poet capable of writing neoclassical verse as well as comic doggerel, the correspondent of prominent individuals, a compiler of commonplace books, and the hostess of a literary salon, perhaps the first in America. If Graeme Fergusson's output was prodigious, most of it was destroyed when descendants burned cartloads of her writings over a three-day period. The patchiness of the surviving record provides one reason for the delay in recounting her life.	. . .

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