Stepping Heavenward

Katherine Mortimer's diary from sixteen to middle age: bad temper, vanity, a marriage, children, deaths, and the slow uphill business of becoming good. Prentiss was a minister's wife who lost two children in a single year and wrote the hymn More Love to Thee out of it; this 1869 book sold enormously, and it survives because Katy is genuinely irritating and knows it. Fifty-four plates by painters including Mary Cassatt and J. M. W. Turner follow Katy from girlhood to middle age, matching the diary's domestic scenes with pictures of women, children, and quiet interiors.