Sarton is one of a select company of women whose journals have been recognized as literature in the best sense. Although the range of topics and moods varies widely, the voice that unites these short meditations on daily life, solitude, pain, illness, joy, and loss has the unmistakable authority of a woman who has led the examined life Socrates defined as the mark of the wise. She is widely quoted because so many of her sentences are complete insights in themselves, worth extracting and pondering.

To read her is to quiet the mind and at the same time to take a new look at the ordinary ills that flesh is heir to. Most appropriate perhaps for mature adults, women, and those confronting the issues of slow recovery--the tedium, restlessness and loneliness that attract less sympathy than trauma sometimes, but are often just as physically and spiritually demanding as more dramatic episodes of suffering.