As I Remember

About the book

Beginning with her childhood on Long Island, Marian Gouverneur threads family memories into recollections of New York and Washington society. Schools, fashionable gatherings, notable visitors, diplomatic circles, and personal possessions become ways of recovering a vanished social world. Marriage and a sojourn in China widen the narrative before the Civil War and later life bring further changes. Gouverneur is especially attentive to differences between the education and customs she knew as a child and those familiar to later readers. Her privileged position gives access to memorable encounters, while also shaping what she takes for granted, including inherited attitudes toward slavery and social rank. The book reads as conversational remembrance, assembling public history from the associations and details that remained vivid within one long life.

• Social memory
• Family and public history
• Changing customs

Why read it

Domestic details and personal encounters make the social settings around historical figures unusually tangible.

English text of the 1911 D. Appleton and Company edition