Primary Work

The Journals of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham, from the original Manuscripts, written in 1704 and 1710, 1825 (edited by Theodore Dwight)

The Journal of Madam Knight. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Literature House,1970. F7 .K724

According to Robert O Stephens (listed below), Knight's account, since its first publication in 1825, has been presented as a literary diary of her 1704-1705 trip from Boston to New York rather than as an imaginative woman's odyssey through a wilderness both mythical and actual. Stephens says that the Journal has been characterized in one of three ways:

1. As a refreshingly carnal, external and healthy picture of rural manners - a kind of proto-local colorism.

2. As a cryptic rebellion against Puritan gloom and soberness.

3. Or as an unfortunate lapse in both taste and accuracy of observation.

Stephens concludes: "The Journal affords an expression of the reflective woman's grasp of the wilderness as both world and underworld, local and universal, laughable and terrible. It shows that there is something both alluring and deadly in that external wilderness that mirrors the inner life, something guilty and self-destructive about the underworld mind now understood mythically by depth psychologists. This insight into the perplexities that neither a serenely dogmatic nor serenely reasonable mind perceives is what most clearly links the mind of SKK with the tradition of Hawthorne."

| Top | Selected Bibliography

Brink, Daniel. "Issues in Early American English: Using Evidence from The Journal of Madam Knight." American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 6.2 (Jul 1994): 199-210.

Bush, Sargent, Jr. "Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-1727)." Legacy 12.2 (1995): 112-20.

Cate, Hollis L. "The Figurative Language of Recall in Sarah Kemble Knight's Journal." CEA Critic 43.1 (1980): 32-35.

Derounian Stodola, Kathryn. ed. "The New England Frontier and the Picaresque in Sarah Kemble Knight's Journal." Early American Literature and Culture: Essays Honoring Harrison T. Meserole. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992. 122-31.

Gemme, Paola. "Representing the World in Discourse: A Socio Stylistic Analysis of Multivocality in The Journal of Madam Knight." QDLLSM 6 (1993): 83-100.

Hornstein, Jacqueline. "Comic Vision in the Literature of New England Women before 1800." Regionalism and the Female Imagination 3.2 3 (1977-78): 11-19.

Margolies, Alan. "The Editing and Publication of The Journal of Madam Knight." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 58 (1964): 25-32.

Stanford, Ann. "Three Puritan Women: Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, and Sarah Kemble Knight." American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays. Eds. Maurice Duke, Jackson R. Bryer, M. Thomas Inge. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983. 3-20.

Stephens, Robert O. "The Odyssey of Sarah Kemble Knight." College Language Association Journal 7 (Mar 1964): 247-55.

Thorpe, Peter. "Sarah Kemble Knight and the Picaresque Tradition." College Language Association Journal 10 (1966): 114-21.

Vowell, Faye. "A Commentary on The Journal of Sarah Kemble Knight." Emporia State Research Studies 24 (1976): 44-52.

| Top | Comments on The Journal (from Robert O. Stephens, listed above)

• First published in 1825 and edited by Theodore Dwight who called it as the "display of the cultivated mind and brilliant fancy."
• Madam Knight was already famous as the schoolmistress of Ben Franklin and Samuel Mather.
• The Journal has been presented as a literal diary of Knight's trip from Boston to New York in 1704-5. "This is not a work of fiction, as the scarcity of old American manuscripts may induce some to imagine; but it si a faithful copy from a diary, in the author's own handwriting, compiled soon after her return home, as it appears, from notes recorded daily, while on the road." - Editor Dwight
• "Madam Knight is the truest picture left to us of provincial New England." - Editor George Parker Winship, the 1920 edition of The Journal.
• The Journal has been characterized in one of three ways:
  • as a refreshingly carnal, external and healthy . . . realistic picture of rural manners - a kind of proto local colorism
  • as a cryptic rebellion against Puritan gloom and soberness
  • as an unfortunate lapse of both and accuracy of observation
• The Journal shows the expression of the reflective woman's grasp of the wilderness as both world and underworld, local and universal, laughable and terrible. This links Knight with the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Study Questions

1. Look at Knight as heroine/protagonist of her story/journal.

2. Look carefully at how the wilderness is presented.

3. Look at exactly what she chooses to record in this journal.

4. Notice the lack of religious themes.

MLA Style Citation of this Web Page

Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 2: Early American Literature: 1700-1800 - Sarah Kemble Knight." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. URL: http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap2/knight.html (provide page date or date of your login).  

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