Abigail Smith Adams is best known to the literary world for the letters she wrote during the half century crucial to U.S. nationhood. She is also historically important because she married John Adams (1735-1826), the second president of the United States (1797-1801); and she was the mother of John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), the sixth president (1825-1829). The letters she wrote from the early 1760s until the end of her life represent the most complete surviving record of a woman's experiences during the Revolutionary and early national eras of American history.

Adams's letters reveal her efforts to fashion herself as a model woman according to the standards of the day: a capable and faithful wife, an effective household manager, a devoted mother and sister, and a discriminating reader and writer. They illuminate the public world of politics and the private world of domestic life that Adams and her...