Amelia Akehurst Lines's diaries and letters provide an extraordinarily rich record of the attitudes and values of an "average" American woman of the mid-nineteenth century. Lines was a young New York schoolteacher whose ambition drove her to seek new opportunities in rural Georgia. Her letters and diary entries provide keen observations on Georgia society and yield a great deal of information concerning the family, child-rearing, and other facets of everyday life in both the North and the South. Lines's life, says historian Thomas Dyer in his introduction, is testimony to the mythical quality...