The literary legacy of Martha Laurens Ramsay is found primarily in a slender leather-bound volume, Memoirs of the Life of Martha Laurens Ramsay (1811), compiled and edited after her death by her husband, Dr. David Ramsay. This single publication, republished and excerpted frequently during the nineteenth century, remains important for its passionate tone and for the quality of its spiritual and psychological self-analysis. Ramsay's sophisticated use of religious concepts in her attempts to understand her struggles reveals that she was less intent on autobiographical self-disclosure than on mental grapplings with theological issues. She aimed for spiritual rather than literary immortality. To learn about her life--her ambitions, her probable response to the Revolutionary War, and the emergence of a distinctive "American" identity, even her complex emotions about being a slaveholder married to an antislavery advocate--the reader must examine her writings in the context of the lives and writings of the...