"Virginia Woolf's story "The Legacy" describes a self-absorbed widower's all-too-typical response to the fifteen-volume diary left by his wife: he dismisses it as "nothing in particular." In contrast to that character's trivializing, contemporary feminist scholars have found diaries to be a rich resource for investigating the lives of "ordinary" women. No other documents reveal so completely what one scholar has called "life lived as a process."".

"In this book, Amy L. Wink offers a probing examination of diaries kept by nineteenth-century American women. Her sources include accounts by women who chronicled their lives on the Overland Trail, the journals of two women married sequentially to the same psychologically abusive man, and the diaries of Confederate women who used their writings to comprehend their emotional and spiritual responses to the turmoil of the Civil War.

As Wink notes, such writings demonstrate not only what these women experienced but also how they dealt with and understood that experience."--BOOK JACKET.