"Women who read" could just as well have been entitled women who sang, women who painted, women who played piano or women who danced. All of them, the women who came before us, had anxieties, dreamed of being something more than that which destiny had marked them for. It is the story of the author's mother, the women of her family, but it could also be the story of so many who lived in the post Civil-war era, a difficult time in which they were expected only to be wives and mothers. But these women had a treasure that they kept within them: a voice, a gift, the will to create that in so many cases they hid within the walls of their homes or inside their hearts. She, her mother, eventually managed to turn one of her humble dreams into reality, even though it took seventy years.