“You know my mind is much occupied with the affairs of our Country,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband in 1793. “If as a Female I may be calld an Idle, I never can be an uninterested Spectator...” Through her brilliant and insightful correspondence Adams fully engaged with the political, social, and intellectual currents of her age, and her letters offer a unique vantage on historical events in which her family played so prominent a role. They also bring vividly to life the everyday experience of American women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Library of America presents 430 of these remarkable letters—including more than a hundred published for the first time—in an edition of unparalleled scope selected and annotated by acclaimed Adams biographer Edith Gelles. From virtually the moment she married the ambitious young lawyer John Adams in 1764, Abigail Smith Adams (1744–1818) was more or less on her own. As he rode the colonial court circuits, and later as he was swept up in the emerging imperial crisis, she was left with the primary responsibility for raising and educating the couple’s children, managing their farm and investments, and caring for an extended web of family and friends. Her frank and keenly observant letters to her “Dearest Friend” John and others in the 1760s and 1770s, including her famous call for Adams and his fellow delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to “Remember the Ladies,” reveal her astute political sense and offer an unrivaled portrait of the American Revolution on the home front. In 1784, Adams joined her husband in Europe, opening a grand new field for her talents as social commentator and political adviser. Upon her return to America four years later, Adams became the first vice president’s wife and then the second First Lady of the United States, placing her at the very heart of the founding of the new nation. Even after her husband’s retirement, she continued to comment on the presidential administrations of Jefferson and Madison and on the political career of her son, John Quincy Adams. Throughout, she was an abiding advocate for education and women’s rights. Unlike previous collections of Adams’s letters, this edition represents the full range of her correspondence, including letters to Thomas Jefferson, Mercy Otis Warren, James and Dolley Madison, and Martha Washington, among many others. Erudite and witty, a uniquely talented commentator on political developments and social conventions, Adams is, in Edith Gelles’s words, a homegrown Tocqueville, “a writer whose observations and insights shed light on America and Americans of her time.”