A collection of excerpts from women's diaries over the centuries, including the obvious choices and, more interestingly, the not so obvious. I will confess that I spent little time with Woolf, Ann Frank and Anais Nin, having read more comprehensive accounts of their journals. There are many others represented here and, by and large, the editors have done an exemplary job of choosing excerpts. ( )

Selected excerpts from private diaries of 37 women, known and unknown -- including Louisa May Alcott, Sophie Tolstoy, George Eliot, Anais Nin, in three Parts: Love, Work, and Power.

In the POWER category:

Frances Anne Kemble, the English author of the FIRST authoritative record of actual conditions on one of the "benevolent" slave plantations in America 1838.

Mary Boykin Chesnut, the childless wife of a Southern General, traveled during Civil War recording what people were, not just what they did. (She fought for the South but despised slavery and those white men who defended what she perfectly understood were their "harems".[276])

Carolina Maria De Jesus, born in the favela to illiterate sharecroppers, she became a diarist then a journalist. Her 1960 "Quarto de Despejo" sold more than any other Brazilian book in history. Had honorary Law degree, but died in poverty.

Sweden's Selma Lagerlof, first woman to win the Nobel for Literature.

Katherine Mansfield, short-story writer, New Zealand, died in 1923 (in Europe) age 34, mentions Anton Chekov and Gurdijieff in her diary.

Joanna Field, the English psychologist -- I think of her bringing scientific analysis to bear upon subjective feelings -- true perspective, one admitting the other, flowing and growing?

"We don't see things as they are; we see them as WE are."