From the review: "Working with a wonderful archive of writings produced by propertied Virginians from the mid-seventeenth century through the turn of the twentieth century, Miller shows how ordinary writing served as a site for the negotiation of fluid, mobile identities. This is rich stuff. And, importantly, Miller knows that to celebrate its richness is not enough. Rather, she wants to reassemble this material in order to make an argument about the present, about present conceptions of writing, about what gets noticed and what gets ignored--and in whose interest and to what ends."