cover image Robert Bolling Woos Anne Miller: Love and Courtship in Colonial Virginia, 1760

Robert Bolling Woos Anne Miller: Love and Courtship in Colonial Virginia, 1760

Robert Bolling. University of Virginia Press, $29.5 (188pp) ISBN 978-0-8139-1259-2

From a 1760 diary, edited by a professor of English at the University of Delaware, emerges a colorful picture of the intimate life of aristocratic Virginians. Robert Bolling's journal-epistle, ``A Circumstantial Account of Certain Transactions, that once greatly interested the Writer . . . '' records his wooing of Anne ``Nancy'' Miller from January through September of 1760. The diary, composed after the courtship was over (each later married another), includes comments about the political milieu. Bolling offers an interesting glimpse into wealthy Virginia society in which the intricacies of courtship among the gentry took place in a whirl of parties and dances. The recently discovered journal, including a hand-drawn local map, casts light on a previously shadowed facet of colonial American life. (July)