JULIA NEWBERRY'S DIARY—Introduction by Margaret Ayer Barnes & Janet Ayer Fairbank—Norton ($2.50).
"I have been twice to Florida, & three times to Europe. I have been to two boarding-schools, & gained a great many friends in diffirent ways. ... I have learned how to faint, & have inheirited a fortune. Have been through a long illness & had a terrible sorrow! And I might have been married if I had choosen . . . I have never sworn eternal friendship to anyone, nor written poetry since I was eleven years old." On her 17th birthday (Dec. 28, 1870), Julia Newberry thus cast up her accounts. This two-year diary of a last-century Chicago socialite is less kittenish and platitudinous than most of its kind, may seem surprisingly lively to modern readers who put family albums on a level with comic strips. It will be of special interest to Chicagoans whose grandparents figure—not always to their advantage—in its sprightly pages.
Julia Newberry was born with a good-sized silver spoon in her good-sized mouth. When her father died he left his wife and two daughters so well off that they could easily afford $60,000 to make over their town house into what everyone said was "the handsomest house in Chicago." The hall was 70 ft. long, and Julia had her own "studio." with a private staircase. They could also afford to leave it for summers in Richfield Springs, N. Y., visits to Utica, Manhattan, St. Augustine, Fla., extended grand tours abroad. Their U. S. travels were of course by "palace car" (early Pullman). Julia's plaints of their continual traveling, her vehement assertions that Chicago is her home, "worth all London Paris & New York put together," ring a little false, her boredom is a little showy; but she had another cause for ennui: ill health. Undergoing the rigors of a Manhattan dress-fitting one day she suddenly keeled over. Afterwards she admitted to her diary: "I always wanted to faint once, just to know how it felt; & it is very nasty; however heroines always faint, but authors never say it is because they are billious." This mysterious "billiousness" took her out of a fashionable Manhattan finishing school, sent her to European watering-places and seaside resorts (always fashionable places, however, where shoals of eligible young U. S. bachelors danced constant attendance), finally turned into a throat inflammation that carried her off, at 22, to a Roman cemetery.