Lyons explores how seven well-known 19th century women found refuge, voice and identity through the diaries they kept as girls and young women in this compelling exploration of how writing can help define one's life. In their diary writing, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Forten, Sarah Jane Foster, Kate Chopin, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Ida B. Wells and Charlotte Perkins-Gilman found the space to explore who they were and what they might become, Lyons argues. It was a place where their dreams and ideas could grow unfettered by the limitations placed by society or their families. Lyons' uses brief, sporadic excerpts of the diary material throughout her discussion of each woman, but it is her own exploration of the relationship between the young writer and the woman she became that defines the text. (Ages 12-15)

These diaries contain secrets, and author Mary Lyons has uncovered many of them hidden in the journals of seven extraordinary nineteenth-century women: By keeping diaries these women, both black and white, discovered themselves.