Helen R. Deese

editor, Boston Historical Society

Helen R. Deese is the Caroline Healey Dall editor for the Massachusetts Historical Society. In nineteenth-century Boston, amidst the popular lecturing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the discussion groups led by Margaret Fuller, sat a remarkable young woman, Caroline Healey Dall (1822-1912): transcendentalist, early feminist, writer, reformer, and perhaps most importantly, active diarist. During the seventy-five years that Dall kept a diary, she captured all the fascinating details of her sometimes agonizing personal life, and she also wrote about all the major figures who surrounded her.