In 1851, fourteen-year-old orphan Ann McMath was sent to live with her uncle and his family in their parsonage in Horseheads, New York. Lonely and full of self doubt, anxious to establish female friendships in a new place, and questing for intellectual and moral perfection, she began keeping journal when she was seventeen and wrote in it regularly for the next five years, until she was married. A fascinating example of "biography from below," McMath's journal offers a rare glimpse of of life in the 1850s as it was lived by ordinary women, told in the authentic voice of a young woman coming of age in the Burned-Over District of Western New York. In addition to the journal itself, the book includes an introduction by editor C. Stewart Doty, as well as a geneaology, notes on the text, and a section entitled "People in the Life of Ann McMath," which gives brief biographies of everyone mentioned in the journal.