Sarah Kemble Knight: Contribution as American Author

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      Sarah Kemble Knight composed her journal as a descriptive record of a trip she took from Boston to New York and then back again in 1704-1705. It was printed only in the next century as The Journal of Madam Knight (1825). It was published in the way many manuscripts were at the time, by being circulated among the friends. Her writings reveal a lively, humorous, gossipy woman alert to the comedy and occasional beauty of life in early America. She was aware also of the comic figure she herself sometimes cuts “sitting steady”. And she puts it “on my Nagg”. Not only she describes her dreary stay at a night in an wayside inn and also the bleak picture of poverty-stricken family in detail. She calls it a wretched picture of poverty she ever saw. Sometimes, he was struck by the beauty of the landscape he passes through. She also moved by the woods lit by the moon or as she has it, by “Cynthia” a ‘Conductress of the Night’. Nature is beautiful evidently when it evokes thoughts Of a culture. “The dolesome woods”. She calls them elsewhere, in her journal, are at their best when they excite the memories of the town.

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