A window on the America of the Early Republic is opened for us by young Sophie du Pont. Her father, E. I. du Pont, had come from France and in 1802 settled on the banks of the Brandywine Creek, four miles above Wilmington, where he set up a gunpowder manufactory. A period of ten years in the family life of the du Ponts, newly settled in Delaware, is illumined by Sophie's letters, diaries, and sketches from 1823 (when she was thirteen) to 1833 (when she was twenty-three), which have been discovered in the du Pont family and company archives and organized into this charming book by its two researcher authors.
Life in the du Pont household, as in that of any immigrant family, was colorful, the flavor of the old country mingling with the flavor of the new. In a home whose ambience was French, Sophie met many notable Americans as her father's reputation grew and his gunpowder establishment took on increasing importance. There were interesting neighbors, too, and surrounding them all was the wild natural beauty of the shores of the Brandywine.
All this was recorded by Sophie. She had a quick, inquiring mind, a ready sense of the comic and the ridiculous, and a genuine feeling for nature. Most important, for her and for us, she had graphic skill. Her caricatures (she called them "carics") gave her a means of self-expression during her critical teen years and provided entertainment for her brothers and sisters and her close friends. Readers today will be both entertained and informed by Sophie's vignettes, written and drawn, and will be touched by the insights they give into the thoughts of a very young woman coming of age in a very young country.
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