Private Pages: Diaries of American Women 1830s-1970s
by By Franklin, Penny
Category: Fiction , General

A rare and valuable glimpse into the lives of American women—through their diaries, published here for the first time   By turns delightful, poignant, and heartbreaking, these diary entries explore inner landscapes, telling of love, marriage, and motherhood, of religion and family obligation, of the need to break free, to improve oneself, and to make something of one’s life.   In Private Pages we meet a devoted student in Minneapolis in the 1920s, grappling with the issues of her age; a Midwestern farm wife stuck in a loveless marriage in the 1890s; a Depression-era Berkeley, California, woman writing for her unborn grandchildren; a Southern Jewish woman at the end of the Civil War; a professional writer falling in love; and eight others, all of whom touch us in unique ways as we come to know them intimately through their diaries.    Customs and technologies change, but human emotions endure. From a turn-of-the-century thirteen-year-old with a schoolgirl crush on a teacher to an elderly nineteenth-century Quaker at the end of her life, each of these women strikes a chord of sympathy and understanding in us, for their concerns are, after all, very like our own.