"For the historian on your list, Daughter of Boston provides a fascinating glimpse into a woman's life in 19th Century New England. Caroline Healey Dall, the well-educated daughter of a prosperous Boston family, started keeping diaries in 1838, at age 16, until her death in 1912. The early feminist and abolitionist produced 45 volumes, which editor Helen Deese has distilled into small passages that fill a single, thick book."

"Helen Deese finally brings to a wider readership this engrossing diary of a remarkable nineteenth-century woman. Caroline Healey Dall's decades of inveterate and faithful diary keeping, distilled here with sensitivity by Deese, give us a vivid picture of Bostonian culture and the famous intellectual movements she was active in-Transcendentalism, abolition, and woman's rights. Deese offers astute insight into Dall's quest for self-knowledge through private writing. Her most personal dilemma-being duty bound in indissoluble marriage but in love with another man-makes for poignant and gripping reading."

"What a delight! Caroline Dall's previously unpublished journal is a fascinating eyewitness view of the social and political events that defined New England in the mid-nineteenth century. Helen Deese deserves our thanks for rescuing this fascinating woman and her perceptive and often idiosyncratic commentary."

"In Daughter of Boston, Helen Deese, one of our foremost scholars of American Romanticism, has unearthed the fascinating journals of Caroline Healey Dall, a nineteenth-century New Englander who was an astute observer and active participant in nearly every major intellectual and political movement of her day, from Transcendentalism to abolition to women's rights."

"Caroline Healey Dall's writings will become a keystone to our understanding of 19th-century New England…a true historical find."