Chiefly remembered as the young plantation mistress who pioneered the cultivation of indigo in colonial South Carolina, Eliza Lucas Pinckney was also the author of a remarkable collection of letters that chronicled her experiences as a planter, wife, mother, and patriot in eighteenth-century America. Pinckney's early letters discuss her intellectual and social activities, as well as the important agricultural experiments she conducted at her father's plantations in South Carolina. Her later letters, which focus more on family and domestic concerns, also reveal her continuing interest in the world beyond her household. Letter writing gave elite women, many of whom lived in relative seclusion, a means of sharing ideas, emotions, and experiences with those outside their immediate families. Pinckney's lively and vividly descriptive letters give modern readers insights into the lives and concerns of such early American women.

Both in quantity and quality, Pinckney's surviving writings are unusually rich...