cover image A Woman's Wit and Whimsy: The 1833 Diary of Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy

A Woman's Wit and Whimsy: The 1833 Diary of Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy

Anna Cabot Lowell Qu Waterston, Beverly Wilson Palmer, Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy. Northeastern University Press, $21.95 (192pp) ISBN 978-1-55553-574-2

One couldn't have better Brahmin breeding in early 19th-century Boston than to be a Cabot and a Lowell and a Quincy (her father was Harvard's president). Anna Quincy (1812-1899) thus had an opportunity to observe the best of Boston and Cambridge society, and she had some rather tart things to say about it in the diary she kept during the year of 1833. She remarks on the people, the fashions (""At last...appears Mrs. Inglis with a thing upon her head which can only be compared to the Egyptian paintings on Sarcophagus""), and the required flirtations between eligible men and women such as herself (""I wreathed a remarkable smile,"" she notes, in approaching one young worthy). Her wit is keen as she mocks the rituals and pretensions of society; there is cause to regret she didn't put her satirical literary talent to more use in the fashion of Jane Austen, whom she admired. But still, despite the appearance of President Andrew Jackson at Harvard and a performance by the famed actress Fanny Kemble, these scenes of a leisurely life in the early 1830s will be primarily of interest to students of American social and women's history. 8 illus.