Harriet Lane
The Library of Congress identifies Harriet Lane under the authorized name "Johnston, Harriet Lane, 1830–1903," a designation that captures the arc of a life lived between antebellum America and the turn of the twentieth century.
Born in Mercersburg in 1830, Lane was educated at Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, where she received the formal schooling that shaped her into an accomplished young woman of her era. The facts of her early life in Mercersburg offer little elaboration, yet her education at Georgetown Visitation places her within a tradition of structured, serious preparation for public life — a preparation that would prove consequential as she moved forward into adulthood and the responsibilities that came with it.
Lane died on July 3, 1903, in Narragansett, having lived through more than seven decades of American history. The Library of Congress name authority record, which appends the surname Johnston to her given name, indicates that she is known to posterity under a married name, though the facts available here do not specify further details of that marriage. What the record preserves is the outline of a woman born in a small Pennsylvania town, educated in Washington, and gone finally in a Rhode Island coastal community — a life whose geography alone traces something of the broader movements of nineteenth-century American society. Her name, in its authorized form, continues to serve as an anchor in archival and reference systems that keep her part of the historical record.
Quotes by Harriet Lane
Emma is the engine of this home, the person who propels it forward, keeps everyone fed and clothed and healthy and happy – and yet she’s entirely alone within it, and getting lonelier with every item ticked off her checklist. This is what it comes down to: the flat-out invisible drudgery of family maintenance, the vanishing of personality as everyone else’s accrues.
I turn my back and look out to sea, the sun so low and molten that my eyes fill with tears, and yet I can feel it: a cooler wind is coming in, the edge of evening approaching. Dusk is gathering along the coast, in the coves and quaysides and marinas, where in an hour or so the long strings of coloured bulbs will twinkle and sway; and then it will pass over us-like a visitation: a plague or a blessing...
I know the names of the books – their old covers bleached to palest greens or pinks by the endless cycle of summers – lined up on the shelf.
I’ve thought about the pictures often; what they show or, more accurately, don’t show. Remembering what was happening elsewhere: in the distance, or behind the camera, off to one side.
Over time, I’ve come to see that so much of a personality boils down to confidence: whether you have it, or not.
I found the final plot twist unsatisfying, as plot twists often are: nothing like life, which – it seems to me – turns less on shocks or theatrics than on the small quiet moments, misunderstandings, or disappointments, the things that it’s easy to overlook.
After a while, the rhythm of his breath slackens and deepens, and he rolls away, towards the ghostly hands of his alarm clock.
The moment just before I go to sleep is often the highlight of my day: the letting go, the sense of becoming unreachable.
The house fills with the particular atmosphere that accompanies peacefully sleeping children: a rich narcotic silence that creeps down the stairs and twines itself around the table legs.
I once heard someone on the radio saying that a bee is never more than forty minutes away from starving to death, and this fact has stayed with me because it seems to have a certain personal resonance. My children are in a perpetual proximity to catastrophe: concussion, dehydration, drowning or sunstroke. Keeping them safe requires constant vigilance.I've turned into one of those mothers, full of terror.