Journal of a Lady of Quality

Alexander and Janet Schaw, Scottish siblings, began a journey in 1774 that would take them from Edinburgh to the Caribbean Islands and then to America. Part of the early wave of Scottish colonization, the pair visited family and friends who had already established themselves in the colonies. Journal of a Lady of Quality is Janet Schaw’s account of this voyage through letters to a friend in Scotland. The letters describe the sights, scenery, and social life she encountered, but they also reveal the political atmosphere of an America on the verge of revolution. Stephen Carl Arch provides a new introduction for this Bison Books edition.

Charles McLean Andrews (1863–1943) was a professor of American history at Yale University. He and his wife, Evangeline Walker Andrews, also edited Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal. Stephen Carl Arch is a professor of English at Michigan State University. He is the author of After Franklin: The Emergence of Autobiography in Post-Revolutionary America, 1780–1830 and Authorizing the Past: The Rhetoric of History in Seventeenth-Century New England.