Review of Lucy Breckinridge of Grove Hill: The Journal of a Virginia Girl, 1862-1864 (Women's Diaries & Letters of the Nineteenth-Century South)

This Civil War diary comes not from a soldier’s point of view, but from that of a teenage girl living on a large slave-holding estate in Virginia. She watches as her brothers and male friends go off to the war:
"I wish the women could fight.. I would gladly shoulder my pistol to shoot some Yankees if it were allowable."
Unfortunately, being a only a girl, her prospects were limited to staying home reading novels, tending to the wounded, mourning lost friends & family, and writing in her trusty diary.
Lucy had a bright and inquisitive mind. She wrote about her frustrations with her lot as a woman in a man’s world (she wasn’t keen on the idea of marriage), religion, love, and other social issues of the day. She intended to destroy her diary someday, but she never got around to it (she died relatively young). I wonder what she'd think if she knew her words would still be read almost 150 years after her death?