Diary of a Williamsburg Hostess: Which Recites the Every Day Events of Life in the Restored Capital of Colonial Virginia

In the gracious, boxwood-lined streets of restored colonial Williamsburg, where eighteenth-century brick has been coaxed back to life and the past is worn like a familiar dress, one woman keeps a private record of the small dramas that fill her days. Diary of a Williamsburg Hostess opens the garden gate and ushers readers into the parlour of a lady whose home stands at the very heart of America's most lovingly reconstructed town, where every visitor, every neighbour, and every changing season becomes worthy of an entry. Written in 1946, as the great Rockefeller restoration was reaching its full flower, this charming chronicle blends gentle social comedy with affectionate, sharp-eyed observation. Through the hostess's pen we meet the curious travellers who arrive by the thousand, the proud locals who guard old customs, and the everyday rhythms of a community suspended between two centuries. Helen Jones Campbell writes with warmth and a sly humour, her fictional diarist insisting, with elaborate and tongue-in-cheek solemnity, that any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely a flight of the reader's imagination. Delicate drawings by Alison Mason Kingsbury accompany the text, deepening the spell of a vanished, gracious world. For admirers of Virginiana, of Colonial Williamsburg, and of the quietly civilised world of mid-century American letters, this is a delightful and unexpected time capsule. It offers more than an entertaining portrait of a singular place; it is a window onto how one generation chose to remember, and to rebuild, its colonial inheritance, and onto the gentle art of hospitality itself. Readers will close its pages charmed, amused, and a little reluctant to leave the company of a hostess who turns the ordinary business of her town into something quietly unforgettable.