Jane Colman Turell was an 18th-century American colonial poet.
Background
Jane Colman Turell was the daughter of the Rev. Benjamin Colman and his first wife, Jane Clark. She was born on February 25, 1708 in Boston, Massachussets, where her father was pastor of the Brattle Street Church.
As the only girl in the family until her seventh year and as a child afflicted with a constitution "wonderful weak and tender, " she received an uncommon share of attention from her father and responded by developing a precocious memory for Scripture texts, Biblical stories, and passages from the catechism. Gov. Joseph Dudley and other gentlemen who frequented Mr. Colman's house used to place little Jane on the table to hear her talk and "owned themselves diverted" by her recitations.
Education
At a very early age she learned to read and rapidly went through her father's library.
Career
A hymn written in her eleventh year was followed a few years later by verseparaphrases of the Psalms, which Mr. Colman criticized and returned to her with edifying poems of his own. He made it clear to her, however, that "a Poetical Flight now and then" was not to be allowed to interrupt her daily hours of reading and devotion.
Her husband cultivated her literary gifts by reading aloud to her books of "Divinity, History, Physick, controversy, as well as Poetry, " as they sat together during the long winter evenings.
Mrs. Turell continued her writing, both in verse and in prose. Besides keeping a religious diary, she composed a poetic eulogy on Sir Richard Blackmore, whom she admired "not as the first of Poets, but as one of the best; consecrating his Muse to the cause of Virtue and Religion"; an appreciative tribute to Edmund Waller "for the Purity of his Style and delicacy of Language"; and "An Invitation into the Country, in Imitation of Horace. "
She died, with all the pious expressions that the occasion demanded, at Medford, aged twenty-seven.
Immediately after her death Mrs. Turell was immortalized in a volume entitled Reliquiae Turellae, et Lachrymae Paternae (Boston, 1735), published in London under the title of Memoirs of the Life and Death of the Pious and Ingenious Mrs. Jane Turell . Collected Chiefly from Her Own Manuscripts (1741). This contains a poetic epistle by the Rev. John Adams, two funeral sermons preached in her honor by her father, and a memoir by her husband. It is the only source of first-hand information about Mrs. Turell's life and character, and the only form in which her poems were published. It also contains selections from her religious meditations and specimens of her letters to her father and his replies.
The image presented to the world by the joint efforts of husband and father was that of a devout woman according to the strict Puritan pattern.
Connections
Jane Colman's marriage to the Rev. Ebenezer Turell, graduate of Harvard College in the class of 1721 and minister at Medford, took place on August 11, 1726.
The only one of her four children who survived her died a year later.