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Reviews of Books
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The Most Learned Woman in America: A Life of Elizabeth Graeme
Fergusson. By
Anne M. Ousterhout
. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004,
Pp. xx, 391. $35.00.)
Reviewed by
Edith Gelles
, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University
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The title of this book is gross hyperbole, if not misrepresentation. I say this because two of my best eighteenth-century friends are Mercy Otis Warren and Abigail Adams (seemingly the only Revolutionary-era woman referred to by only two names). Maybe Fergusson was, probably she wasn't. But the title invites a challenge. Anne M. Ousterhout, the author of this life of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, borrowed the phrase from a late-nineteenth-century hagiography, and it certainly performs both functions of a good title: it attracts attention and gives us some idea about the book's subject. It also provoked my critical faculties. I read with both curiosity and the need to be persuaded. |
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Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, if she is recognized at all, is known as a poet and central figure in pre- and post-Revolutionary Philadelphia literary circles. In an admittedly unscientific survey of my (academic) acquaintances, few had heard of Fergusson, and some vaguely identified her as a literary figure. My crowd is mostly historians, but when I ventured abroad into the territory of literature, there was some familiarity, but little intimacy. Few had read Fergusson, for example. This is her first full biography, and it is a good one. But how and why is Fergusson's a valuable story? It could be measured by three standards: Fergusson as poet, since this is how she is portrayed; Fergusson as feminist icon, since mostly feminists have been interested in her; and Fergusson as historic figure, since she lived through a major historic epoch. Each of these is implicit in Ousterhout's depiction of Fergusson's significance. |
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Elizabeth Graeme was born in 1737, making her slightly younger than Mercy and a decade older than Abigail. Her father, Thomas Graeme, was a physician who had emigrated from Scotland, and her mother, Ann Diggs Graeme, whose stepfather was deputy governor of Pennsylvania, was born in England. Elizabeth was born not only into wealth but also pedigree. She had three older siblings. The family home, Graeme Park, was in Horsham township, some twenty miles outside Philadelphia, but the family also rented a home in the city. Although schools for girls existed in Quaker Pennsylvania, there is no evidence of Elizabeth's having attended school, and the author reasonably speculates that she was educated by her parents and tutors. As she later in life translated Fenelon's The Adventures of Telemachus, she knew French well. Her writings were liberally peppered with references to ancient literature, so she might have read classical languages as well. Hers was, indeed, an exceptional education for a woman and perhaps off-putting to eligible young men, for by the age of thirty-five she was not yet married. |
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As a young woman of fifteen, she did form an attachment to Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son, William, of whom her parents did not approve (probably for good cause). The relationship foundered when William accompanied his father to England in 1757. Elizabeth took to her bed with an undefined illness after learning, upon his return to America, of William's marriage to an English woman. She recovered when her parents agreed to her visiting the mother country, accompanied by their local clergyman. She spent almost two years in England, sometimes traveling, sometimes staying by herself in lodgings, all the time meeting literary figures and partaking of cultural events. |
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