Lois Henderson Bayliss

This intimate record - written by a gifted story-teller in spurts from 1931 to 1974 - provides glimpses into a girlhood in pre-World War I Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Pigeon Cove summer colony on Cape Ann as well as experiences as a young woman in the Roaring Twenties in New York City.

Bayliss’s diary entries are composed while she is raising three young children during the Great Depression on her own in rundown neighborhoods near Harvard Square; during her stay at a Bruderhof commune in the jungles of Paraguay in the late 1950s; while working briefly in live-in positions as nursing-home cook, Radcliffe College pantry-maid, and Back Bay rooming-house manager; and while living in Boston’s South End slums during Urban Renewal in the 1960s.

Bayliss muses about her upbringing by Victorian parents, her love life, her travels in North and South America, her past jobs (including as a stewardess on Norwegian freight ships), her frequent periods of poverty and loneliness as well as joy, her perpetual hopes for literary recognition, and her relationship with God.