ABSTRACT
During her active adult life as a playwright, poet, political writer, essayist, and historian, as well as friend, sister, wife, and mother, Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) wrote hundreds of letters, leaving behind a rich trove of words and ideas from one of the new republic’s first true intellectuals and one of its most politically committed women. One letter, a warning to a son not to be seduced by the amoral advice contained in the published letters of Lord Chesterfield, appeared in print in her lifetime. 1 Others, particularly advice letters to young women, circulated in hand-copied versions among other women, who shared Warren’s words of wisdom with each other. Many letters Warren had copied at her behest by her oldest son, James, to be passed to posterity. The rest, spread to numerous recipients, remained in various family papers or over time disappeared. There is no complete catalogue of extant Warren correspondence, no complete collection. To be sure, a number of letters have appeared in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century compilations of letters by multiple hands, but until Sharon Harris and I edited a volume of selected correspondence, no one had tried to make Mercy Warren’s letters the core of a published book. 2
