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.