ABSTRACT
In 1796, a 16-year-old Connecticut girl transcribed her day’s activities in her diary: “Finished reading the ‘Transition of a Moment.’ Heard the news of Polly Buel’s death. [S]ewed at school. Parsed. Fixed my things to wear to the funeral. Dressed & went. There was quite a large concourse of people. [F]elt rather tired” (16). In a few brief lines, Charlotte Shelton transitioned between her morning reading of a European epistolary novel, The Rencontre, or Transition of a Moment (1785), and her attendance at a woman’s funeral. Both events garner mention in her diary but neither appears to supersede the other in importance. Shelton’s spare style makes it difficult to say whether Polly Buel was a close companion or a distant acquaintance but the lack of emotional reaction to the death stands out. Shelton’s diary challenges the eighteenth-century belief that women were overrun by their emotions, given to fits of excessive mourning or indulgent attachment to fictional romances. Instead, she appears quite tempered in her response to both, employing the same dispassionate writing technique to document her life experiences and to delineate her reading habits. Her assessment of Transition of a Moment, for example, is simply, “I like it pretty well” (16). Within her diary, Shelton adopts an attitude of authority and rationality, affirming her ability to not simply record but also evaluate the subject matter.
