Beschreibung:
<jats:p> The memoirs of pious Christians, frequently edited by family members or intimate friends and carefully based on their extant papers, proliferated in the first half of the nineteenth century. These lives document the legacy of the Didactic Enlight enment of the previous century in their preoccupation with death and inclusive friend ship, their refusal to draw sharp boundaries between the public and the private, the spiritual and the temporal, and in their appreciation for the rational capacity of women. This study focuses on the life of Mary Hawes Van Lennep (1821-1844), missionary wife to Turkey, as traced by her mother, wife of the prominent Hartford, Connecticut preacher, Rev. Joel Hawes. It argues that friendship, as a moral and spiritual culture of bonding and separation, disciplined parents, children and friends alike and has particular significance for female identity formation. It also concludes that these evangelical memoirs are an important source for understanding a particular historical effort to live by a difficult form of affectivity that linked individuals to family and the wider community in a time when historical forces tended to promote the opposite. </jats:p>