Susan Mansfield Huntington was a New England philanthropist, diarist, religious writer, and poet. She is best known for her letters and journals, posthumously collected and published as Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Susan Huntington, of Boston, Mass. (1826). Concerned primarily with questions of faith and duty, Huntington's writings exemplify the intense self-scrutiny that characterized Christian women's autobiography in the early national period. Such pious memoirs--typically Protestant women's personal diaries and correspondence collected by family members after the writer's death--were widely read by evangelicals in the new republic and Europe. The reception of Huntington's writing reflected the popularity of the genre. Her memoir sold out two editions of one thousand copies each in its first year of publication. By the time the third American edition came out in 1829, the book had already gone through five British editions.

A minister's wife active in organizing the first American benevolent societies, Huntington wrote...