Faye Vowell (Essay Date Winter 1976)

SOURCE: Vowell, Faye. "A Commentary on 'The Journal of Sarah Kemble Knight'." The Emporia State Research Studies 24, no. 3 (winter 1976): 44-52.

In the following essay, Vowell praises Knight's narrative as "fresh," "delightful," and "humorous."

The Journal of Sarah Kemble Knight is one of those delightful, almost forgotten, pieces of American literature which one occasionally encounters. The journal itself recounts a trip made by horseback between Boston and New York, with an intermediate stop in New Haven, in the year 1704. But the account is lifted out of the ordinary by the fact that the journey was made by a thirty-eight year old woman. A middle class American woman capable and assertive in her own right, Sarah Kemble Knight contradicts the stereotypes of the delicate female...