author
Anna Green Winslow
1759–1779
A lively young Boston diarist, she left one of the most vivid firsthand portraits of girlhood in colonial America. Her writing captures fashion, school life, family ties, and the first stirrings of the Revolution through the eyes of a sharp and observant teenager.
1 Audiobook
Diary of Anna Green Winslow, a Boston School Girl of 1771
by Anna Green Winslow
About the author
Born on November 29, 1759, Anna Green Winslow came from a prominent New England family with roots in Boston and Nova Scotia. Between 1771 and 1773, while living in Boston away from her parents, she wrote a series of letters and diary-like entries that recorded her daily life with unusual energy and detail.
Those writings are remembered for their bright, personal view of the world around her: lessons, churchgoing, social visits, clothing, hairstyles, and the manners expected of a well-brought-up girl. Because she wrote at the moment tensions were rising before the American Revolution, her pages also preserve an intimate glimpse of elite Boston life on the edge of historic change.
Although she died young, on July 19, 1780, her journal endured and was later published as Diary of Anna Green Winslow, a Boston School Girl of 1771. Today it remains valuable not just as a historical document, but as the voice of a witty, curious young writer whose everyday observations still feel immediate and human.