In 1889, Alice Barrett moved west from Ontario to the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia to keep house for her brother and uncle. She soon married Harold Parke, a former military officer, and recorded her experiences in a series of notebooks.

Few women's diaries have survived from that time, and Parke recalls a period of profound transformation in a region newly opened to white settlement by the railway. She was an astute observer and an exceptional writer, and her diaries provide valuable insights into work, health, religion, race and gender relations, and women's lives. She was...