This title details Elizabeth Murray's struggle to achieve economic self-sufficiency in 18th-century Boston. It makes use of Murray's own papers, which include correspondence and business records, in order to get past the veneer of gentility and see the complex woman underneath.

Precisely because Murray breaks Scholars of early American history will find much of interest in this rare book-length portrait of an eighteenth-century woman. Cleary tells an engaging story. The quotations from eighteenth-century letters keep us as close as possible to the perspective that Elizabeth Murray had at that time and help us to avoid superimposing a present-day view