Produced by Mark C. Orton, Karen Dalrymple and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
[Transcriber's Note: In the original text, some footnotes were referenced more than once in the text. For clarity, these references have had a letter added to the number, for example, 26a.]
_Professor of English_ _San Jose State College, California_
THE WIT AND HUMOR OF COLONIAL DAYS, ENGLISH FICTION FROM THE FIFTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, A HISTORY OF SOUTHERN LITERATURE, THE WRITINGS OF COLONIAL VIRGINIA, THE CAVALIER POETS, THREE CENTURIES OF SOUTHERN POETRY, ETC.
CORNER HOUSE PUBLISHERS WILLIAMSTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS
_First Printed in 1922_ _Reprinted in 1968_ _by_ CORNER HOUSE PUBLISHERS
This book is an attempt to portray by means of the writings of colonial days the life of the women of that period,--how they lived, what their work and their play, what and how they thought and felt, their strength and their weakness, the joys and the sorrows of their everyday existence. Through such an attempt perhaps we can more nearly understand how and why the American woman is what she is to-day.
For a long time to come, one of the principal reasons for the study of the writings of America will lie, not in their intrinsic merit alone, but in their revelations of American life, ideals, aspirations, and social and intellectual endeavors. We Americans need what Professor Shorey has called "the controlling consciousness of tradition." We have not sufficiently regarded the bond that connects our present institutions with their origins in the days of our forefathers. That is one of the main purposes of this study, and the author believes that through contributions of such a character he can render the national intellectual spirit at least as valuable a service as he could through a study of some legend of ancient Britain or some epic of an extinct race. As Mr. Percy Boynton has said, "To foster in a whole generation some clear recognition of other qualities in America than its bigness, and of other distinctions between the past and the present than that they are far apart is to contribute towards the consciousness of a national individuality which is the first essential of national life.... We must put our minds upon ourselves, we must look to our past and to our present, and then intelligently to our future."