1808, New England, Leah Halper

Having avoided the padlock of marriage, carefully managing her rental income, M. could leave—by coach, taking modest meals, drinking water only. God’s world offered glorious possibility: friends-to-be, a glimpse of the sublime. Books.

A woman of 35 journeying freely was singular, feral, dangerous. Her brother tried everything to tie her into place caring for his children. Everything failed. Used to having his way, he became satirical and foretold unladylike adventures: overflowing privies, drunken coachmen, handsy innkeepers (M. is no beauty, he told his wife, still her honor is at risk.) M. merrily suggested in her first letter that women and children are sturdy independents. Thus “I enjoyed my last stage journey so well…I shall never feel reluctant to removals, and never intend to be laughed out of them.” 

Men were destroying land for metals and minerals; she prospected for libraries. Books provided an earthly parallel and preview to rewards in the afterlife. Her criteria for choosing towns was: how many libraries were there? She wanted theology, natural history, literature—and strangers, who classed her with six-toed cats and savant horses, were fascinated. She was directed to the libraries of ministers, schoolmasters, and farmers whose minds travelled beyond their fields. Their libraries were private, of course, but she talked her way in. No one resisted. In country where hogs and rain were common topics, people found her wonderful. 

Reading material ascertained, she would enquire who in the town let clean and tidy rooms. Libraries were no guarantee of orderly homes, and often proved the opposite. M. was no stickler—a clean house alas augured a put-upon woman to keep it, which did not guarantee tranquility. No one who kept slaves got a pence from her. Still, mess was distracting. She often boarded near, not in, homes with libraries. 

Books were men’s purview, but there was an occasional woman or girl whose father had been reluctant to condemn a fine mind to ignorance. She encountered a Vermont minister and his wife who loved astronomy as equals, and woke her by arrangement on clear nights at 2 a.m. so they could share a telescope. In a time when people looked up to address God, they described the cold barren universe, its vast unfriendliness dwarfing human events. M. speculated with them on the implications for the afterlife and belief.

She met an apple-cheeked New Hampshire boy, indistinguishable from his cousins until he spoke, preparing to leave for Harvard with a head so full of Greek that she predicted, rightly, he would be a classics scholar. For years he sent her his books cleverly inscribed. And boarding in New Hampshire, M. found a British farmwife so resourceful even her chickens kept schedules. She’d invented a two-headed broom, and fastened a clever book-holder to her butter churn. At breakfast one day when the farmer was in his field, the wife confessed that her father was an Oxford don. She pulled open an attic ladder and when M. climbed up, there were four shelves of leather books, dusted and gleaming: the best 18th century philosophers, naturalists, and historians. The woman could ably discuss them all. Once when the slate roof leaked the farmer was slow to fix it, she related. She’d covered the books with oilcloth, asked once more, then served porridge morning, noon, and night. He fixed the roof before breakfast the next day. M. stayed for two months.

Poor weather, bad meals, fussing hosts were bearable if the library was good—unless M. was obliged to put aside her book and hunt for quiet or a decent fire or an inn where roast joints were served sizzling and tender. Then she left. If her brother threatened a visit, she removed immediately, sending regrets but no destination. Children recognized a fellow anarchist. When their demands became incessant, M. sent them to hunt snipe or find whortleberries, if berries were out of season. She amused them until she ran out of books, then moved on. Decades later they wondered who the small bright lady—so erudite and witty, so dismissive of convention—could have been.