Esther Edwards Burr was the author of a letter-journal that provides one of the earliest extensive accounts of a colonial American woman's daily life. Most women of her era wrote primarily for exchange with friends and circulation among acquaintances, and the letter-journal that Esther Burr exchanged with Sarah Prince was no exception. Writing on vellum with quill pens, Esther Burr recorded daily entries of varied lengths and then she bundled them into "paquets" of up to twenty pages whenever a suitable courier was available. These "paquets" also contained "privacies," secret enclosures recording candid opinions on mutual acquaintances that Sarah burned after reading them. In contrast to these evanescent texts, the letter-journal was designed to be preserved and shared among their circle of friends, a testament of Esther and Sarah's intertwined religious and intellectual lives.

While Sarah Prince's half of the correspondence has been lost, Esther Burr's letter-journal remained...