Sarah Kemble Knight's published journal recounts the trip she made from her Moon Street home in Boston to New Haven and New York City and back between 2 October 1704 and 3 March 1705. Her five-month, two-hundred-mile journey, undertaken to settle her cousin Caleb Trowbridge's estate on behalf of his widow, enabled her to negotiate cultural restrictions on women's freedom and identity. At the time of Knight's journey the road, though increasingly well traveled, was still treacherous and might have tested the hardiest of horsemen. The thirty-eight-year-old Knight, however, viewed her situation with humor, and despite her occasional expressions of fear and helplessness, her bravery and sense of adventure contradict the stereotype of the passive and delicate woman who was forced to abandon her home and friends by a husband blind with wanderlust. Leaving her husband and daughter in Boston, she was neither passive nor fearful. She was physically, emotionally, and financially...