The Woman Who Lived by the Page — Hannah Adams

The house in Medfield, Massachusetts, is full of books and short of money. Her father is an invalid bookseller who takes in boarders to get by. Some of the boarders pay their keep by teaching her what they know. She reads everything within reach.

It is 1784.

She does not just read for comfort. She turns a lifetime of borrowed reading into the first work of its kind, an ordered account of the world’s religious sects, arranged and written by her alone.

She does not just publish one book. She follows it with a history of New England and a history of the Jews, the second written with a sympathy almost no Christian writer of her time afforded the subject.

She does not just write as a pastime. She earns her bread by it, decade after decade, when almost no woman in the country had ever done so.

Her Spark of Liberty was the page. The plain idea that a woman with no school, no patron, and no inheritance could make a living from her own mind.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life”

She published An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects in 1784. A Summary History of New-England followed in 1799, and a History of the Jews in 1812. She is widely credited as among the first American women to support herself entirely by writing. It was never an easy living, but it was hers. When a minister named Jedidiah Morse brought out a competing work she believed was drawn from her own without credit, she fought him over it, and the dispute became one of the earliest American arguments over who owns what a writer makes. She kept at the work for nearly five decades. She died in Brookline, Massachusetts, on December 15, 1831, and was laid to rest at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where her monument became one of its first landmarks.

Her name was Hannah Adams.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

The Speedwell’s Confession, Book One of the Sparks of Liberty series, is live on Amazon Kindle and free with Kindle Unlimited: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GZ5QH7L8

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