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.
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