Walking by Faith: The Diary of Angelina Grimke, 1828-1835.

Walking by Faith: The Diary of Angelina Grimke, 1828-1835. Edited by Charles Wilbanks. Women's Diaries and Letters of the South. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xxviii, 245. $39.95, ISBN 1-57003-511-3.)

Accounts about Angelina Grimkd's public life proliferate, but fewer portraits of her private life have been written. In Walking by Faith: The Diary of Angelina Grimke, 1828-1835, Charles Wilbanks attempts to remedy this imbalance by presenting an edited version of Angelina Grimke's personal diary. Spanning the dates January 10, 1828, to October 1835, the diary provides a personal glimpse into the intellectual and spiritual conflicts Grimke experienced during her early adult years in Charleston and Philadelphia. Wilbanks identifies "three life-changing decisions" that occupied much of Grimke's time (p. xxi). Growing discontent over the treatment of slaves, particularly regarding slaves in her own family, led her to ultimately question the institution as a whole. Grimke also struggled with her religious identity, moving, sometimes painfully, from the Episcopal to the Presbyterian to the Quaker denominations within a short period of time. Details about complicated relations with family members, particularly between Angelina and her mother, Mary Smith Grimke, also occupy much of the diary. While historians have previously examined these central issues, Walking by Faith offers a fresh, detailed perspective on Grimke's struggles, allowing Angelina's words to speak directly to the reader.

When Grimke began her diary in 1828, she struggled with a myriad of issues relating to her self-identity. By 1835 she had permanently relocated to the North and had become active in the abolitionist movement. The act of writing in her diary served an important rhetorical function that helped transform the young Charlestonian from a private to a public figure, Wilbanks contends. Not only did it allow Grimke to work through conflicting questions about her own identity, but it also motivated her to save the souls of others and ultimately prepared her to enter the public spotlight. "As she gradually became a public figure and her diary concluded, she turned her instrument of redemption from the circle of friends and family" to "a larger audience watching her upon the public stage," Wilbanks asserts (p. xxv). With a stronger sense of self-identity and a readiness to participate in a public life dedicated to ending slavery, Angelina no longer needed to continue her diary.

Walking by Faith is a valuable tool for historians, providing an important glimpse into the struggles that ultimately prompted Angelina Grimke to leave South Carolina and publicly embrace abolitionism and feminism. Wilbanks makes a persuasive point about the rhetorical importance of Grimke's diary. Clearly the diary had a therapeutic, transforming function, but other factors also shaped Grimke's decision to reject slavery and move to the North, not the least being her sister Sarah. Wilbanks notes that Sarah's influence on Angelina "is widely known," but closer examination of the various factors that significantly affected Grimke's decisions would have enhanced the author's introduction (p. xii). Likewise, one is left to wonder about the personal struggles Grimke faced after 1835. Still, this impressively edited diary is essential to any study of one of America's most prominent antebellum reformers.

KIMBERLY R. KELLISON

Baylor University