Miss Hannah Adams, born in Massachusetts in 1755, may be accepted as the first American woman who made literature her profession. Her appearance as a pioneer in this country corresponds closely in time with that of Mary Wollstonecraft in England. She wrote, at seventy-seven, the story of her life. Her account sets forth clearly the difficulties which, in her youth, had to be dealt with by a woman seriously undertaking authorship. Ill-health, which forbade her attending school, was an individual disadvantage; but she remarks incidentally on the defectiveness of the country school, where girls learned only to write and cipher, and were, in summer, “instructed by females in reading, sewing, and other kinds of work.... I remember that my first idea of the happiness of heaven was of a place where we should find our thirst for knowledge fully gratified.” How pathetically the old woman recalls the longing of the eager girl! All her life she labored against odds; learning, however, the rudiments of Latin, Greek, geography, and logic, “with indescribable pleasure and avidity,” from some gentlemen boarding at her father’s house. Becoming interested in religious controversy, she formed the plan of compiling a “View of Religions”; not at first hoping to derive what she calls “emolument” from the work. To win bread she relied at this time upon spinning, sewing, or knitting, and, during the Revolutionary War, on the weaving of bobbin lace; afterward falling back on her scant classical resources to teach young gentlemen Latin and Greek. Meanwhile the compilation went on. “Reading much religious controversy,” observes Miss Adams, “must be extremely trying to a female, whose mind, instead of being strengthened by those studies which exercise the judgment, and give stability to the character, is debilitated by reading romances and novels.” This sense of disadvantage, of the meekly accepted burden of sex, pervades the autobiography; it seems the story of a patient cripple. When the long task was done, her inexperience made her the dupe of a dishonest printer, and although the book sold well, her only compensation was fifty copies, for which she was obliged herself to find purchasers, having previously procured four hundred subscribers. Fortunately she had the copyright; and before the publication of a second edition, she chanced to make the acquaintance of a clerical good Samaritan, who transacted the business for her. The “emolument” derived from this second edition at last enabled her to pay her debts, and to put out a small sum upon interest. Her “History of New England,” in the preparation of which her eyesight was nearly sacrificed, met with a good sale; but an abridgment of it brought her nothing, on account of the failure of the printer. She sold the copyright of her “Evidences of Christianity” for one hundred dollars in books.