As I Remember

As I Remember is Marian Gouverneur’s warm and detailed recollection of American social life across the nineteenth century, published in 1911 when she was an old woman with a long memory. Born into a prominent New York family and married into another, she recalls the people, manners, and events of Washington and New York from the 1830s onward, including glimpses of presidents, statesmen, and the shifting customs of polite society before and after the Civil War. Her book is a friendly, gossipy, and genuinely valuable record of a vanished way of life, told by someone who lived near its centre. This free PDF and EPUB offers the complete memoir.