New England Women’s Diaries Project
New Year in Cuba: Mary Gardner Lowell's Travel Diary, 1831-1832
Edited and with an introduction by Karen Robert
8 illustrations/notes/bibliography/index/ 208 pages
2002 ISBN 1555535593 * $45.00 cloth
2002 ISBN 1555535585 * $17.95 paper
In late 1831, at the age of 29, Mary Gardner Lowell and her young son George accompanied her husband,
the leading Boston financier and merchant Francis Cabot Lowell II, on a voyage to Cuba, a newly popular
destination for Boston gentry. They spent several weeks on the island, traveling from the bustling
commercial city of Havanna to the slave plantations of Matanzas province before making their way up
the Mississippi River by steamboat on the return home.
Lowell's journal of the adventure that took her from the safe and comfortable environs of Beacon Hill is
published here in its entirety for the first time. She describes in vivid detail each event and observation
of a journey that crossed many boundaries: between abolitionist Boston and slave-owning Cuba, between the
parlor and the sugar mill, between refined Boston and the hinterlands of the Caribbean and river towns of
the Mississippi Valley. Lowell's diary includes chronicles of social calls, parties, and invitations, as
well as intimate descriptions of domestic and family life. She comments extensively on the different social
conventions for American and Spanish women and provides astute accounts of the workings of the cane sugar
mills, the brutal living and working conditions of slaves, and the tensions involved in "managing"
the slave population.
Lowell is a colorful storyteller who writes with fine precision and a critical eye, salting her narrative with
gossip and a good dose of humor about her experiences throughout the trip. Her journals encompass stories of
arrogant Spanish men, shipwrecks, slave uprisings, business deals gone bad, and scandalous marriages.
This captivating travel diary brings to life Mary Gardner Lowell and her times, and it offers illuminating
insights into class, race, and gender relations as well as the evolving relationship between the United States
and Cuba in the antebellum period.
KAREN ROBERT is Assistant Professor of History at St. Thomas University. She lives in New Brunswick, Canada.
LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH, editor of the New England Women's Diaries Series, is the James Duncan Phillips Professor
of History and Director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She
is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary,
1785-1812. She lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Durham, New Hampshire.
Co-published with Northeastern University Press.
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Also available from
Northeastern University Press
1-800-666-2211
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