A Passionate Usefulness: The Life and Literary Labors of Hannah Adams

In A Passionate Usefulness: The Life and Literary Labors of Hannah Adams, Gary Schmidt explores the life and scholarship of one of America’s first notable writers and historians, Hannah Adams (1755-1831). This pioneering author overcame poverty, bouts of severe illness and blindness, as well as her gendered exclusion from the male-dominated province of literature to become one of the earliest Americans not only to earn a living as a writer, but to establish a transatlantic reputation as a respected scholar. Although many New England women had entered into the world of professional writing by the end of the eighteenth century, Adams was one of few who rejected the accepted forms and circumstances of female publication, choosing instead aggressively to publish her works under her own name and to write in the conventionally masculine literary forms of history and theology. She asserted the right of the female author to enter the public sphere as well as her right to enter that sphere as a scholar intent on shaping the national dialogue about American identity after the Revolution. As Schmidt observes, Adams “was doing nothing less as a writer than staking a claim for full participatory citizenship in the emerging nation” (5).

Schmidt’s focus in A Passionate Usefulness is to trace the trajectory of Adams’ life and her difficult negotiation of the delicate balance between “author” and “compiler” in her works at a time when an overtly intellectual woman writer was an uncomfortable figure for male and female authors alike. Unconcerned with her “place” as a woman writer, however, Adams sought to exercise the “rigorous, demanding, intellectual judgment, she believed, that led to the production of ‘useful’ works” (11). She was, as Schmidt aptly puts it, a woman, “virtually alone, [who] defied the unstated costs to a woman writer whose passion was to write of the matters of the mind rather than those of the heart” (12).

Schmidt’s chronological examination of Adams’ life and her development as an author includes an exhaustive interrogation of her life experiences, reading interests, intellectual influences, and literary sources. Schmidt makes the compelling argument that as Adams’ life progressed, so did her confidence in her abilities as a historian and her own sense of authorial agency. Divided into six sections, A Passionate Usefulness details the particularities of each one of Adams’ major works, the significant events of her life and her reading that affected them, and the growing style and maturity with which Adams faced each new challenge.

The first section, titled “The Solitude of the Reader,” sets up Adams’ childhood and early adulthood in the rural town of Medfield, Massachusetts. Here, Adams began work on her An Alphabetical Compendium, a religious dictionary that sought to depict the 276 sects within Christianity as well as religions from around the world in an objective manner. Although an abridgement of numerous and scattered other sectarian dictionaries, An Alphabetical Compendium was a unique work in its open-minded approach to sectarianism that clearly showcases Adams’ early abilities to transcend her stated role as compiler.

The second section, “The Historian of New England,” examines Adams’ foray into history with her A Summary History of New England, published 1799. This text was a strongly Federalist, narrative history of New England compiled from the various and sundry mass of New England histories that flooded the American market during the 1790s. Although battling severe eyestrain, which affected her abilities to abridge and document her sources carefully (Adams interestingly was one of few authors of the period concerned with source documentation and copyright violation), Adams’ authorial persona was developing. As Schmidt notes of A Summary History, “Adams asserts the right, necessity, and appropriateness of a female point of view ... Adams was moving from the tasks of the mere compiler toward the role of the author” (74).

Next, “Proving Faith” focuses on Adams’ missionary intent and her growing interest in the conversion of the Jews. Out of these interests, Adams was able to write and publish one of her most personal books, The Truth and Excellence of the Christian Religion Exhibited in 1804. The following two sections, “Comfort and Discomfort—in Society” and “The Writer as Activist Historian,” delve into Adams’ ever-widening social circle in Boston, which included such notable members as William Shaw and Joseph Emerson, and her unfortunate encounter with less-than-gracious competition in the textbook market. Adams’ initial plans to eventually abridge A Summary History for a juvenile audience were thwarted by Jedidiah Morse’s and Elijah Parish’s publication of their Compendious History of New England, leading Adams into a ten-year battle with the conservative Calvinist Morse. Despite the rancor from the struggle with Morse, Adams still published her juvenile history, Abridgment of the History of New-England, in 1805. During the same time, Adams also published her History of the Jews in 1812, in which she sought to produce an accurate and fair representation of the Jewish people from the time of the Old Testament to the present. Proving how their dispersion and sufferings bore testimony to the truth and excellence of Christianity was an additional purpose of this volume. Such dramatic molding of her materials to suit her own purposes bears testimony to Adams’ growing confidence as an author.

The sixth and final section of A Passionate Usefulness, “The Writer’s New Purposes,” traces the final years and publications of Adams. Although her health and mind were beginning to decline, Adams, now in her sixties, had finally found herself in a position of security. She was financially secure due to annuities granted by several members of her Boston circle, and she was now singularly devoted to her writing. In addition to producing new editions of some of her established works, Adams published Letters on the Gospels in 1824, a series of thirty letters organized thematically that would guide the spiritual understanding of youthful readers. In this small work of biblical criticism Adams finally hits her authorial stride. Schmidt observes, “This is no pastiche of sources, no compilation, as so many of her other books had been. Adams filled her book with the voice of her conversations: filled with passion and with information she had gleaned from her wide reading, a voice at times exhortatory, at time explanatory. She is the instructor” (328). Adams’ final work was her Memoir of Miss Hannah Adams, published posthumously in 1832. This modest memoir, marked by restraint and gratitude, held as its thematic center the difficulties of a female writer. Recognizing the enormous struggles of educating herself, the embarrassment of inserting herself into the economy of writing, and the onerous task of commanding appropriate compensation and recognition for her writing, Adams’ memoir is a gracious account of a passionate and useful literary life—as is Schmidt’s biography of this remarkable woman.

This important contribution to eighteenth-century scholarship has as its strongest point Schmidt’s immaculate and exhaustive research into Adams’ copious sources, intellectual influences, and her own methods of compilation. Schmidt reveals the significance and difficulty of Adams’ attempts not only to support herself as an author, but to enter into the intellectual and historical dialogue concerning civic and spiritual issues unique to the burgeoning American nation.