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Ava Chamberlain, Ann M. Little. The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1606–1607, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1606
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The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright is a welcome contribution to the growing body of literature attempting to narrate the lives of unconventional biographical subjects. Esther Wheelwright shares one feature with the subjects of conventional biographies. She was, as Ann M. Little readily admits, an extraordinary person, for, unlike most eighteenth-century women, she inhabited three distinct but interconnected linguistic and cultural worlds during her long life. Forcibly taken from her Puritan home on the Maine frontier when she was a young girl, she lived among the Wabanaki for several years before removing to Québec and joining an Ursuline convent, a vocation she pursued for more than fifty years. Despite this exceptional life, the recovery of Esther Wheelwright’s story is complicated by a number of factors. Little focuses on three: gender, scant written records, and historical compartmentalization. Typical biographical subjects are men who have produced thick archives and who fit neatly into the historiographical narratives favored by professional historians. In contrast, Little takes as her subject a woman whose thinly documented life intersects with multiple categories of analysis: she was English, Native, and French; Protestant and Catholic; worldly and cloistered. Although this complex identity makes Wheelwright interesting, it also makes her story difficult to tell.
