"As a Woman Thinks" by Corra Harris is a reflective memoir written in the early 20th century. It charts the author’s “biography of a mind,” moving from a Georgia plantation childhood through a stern Protestant upbringing, into adult reflections on learning, writing, womanhood, and Southern identity, all delivered with incisive wit and moral candor. The opening of this work rejects mysticism and promises a plainspoken record of thought, separating “mind” from “soul” and defending the first-person “I.” It sketches postwar Southern life and the author’s early years amid gardens, gates, and a road lined with daisies, alongside vivid superstitions and a formative lesson about dignity toward the enslaved and the poor. She recalls how the Old Testament—especially Genesis—shaped her imagination, even as she questions Jonah’s whale, and contrasts her steadfast, rule-keeping mother with her eloquent, errant father in a striking scene of family prayer and repentance. Early schooling brings a love of solitude, disdain for grammar, a taste for the stage, and voracious reading of Plutarch, Tasso, Sophocles, and Swift. A charged supper-table moment—calling Confederates “rebels”—erupts into her father’s fiery defense of the Lost Cause, leading to broader contrasts between New England moralism and Southern candor. She examines childish lying, the birth of conscience, and the uses of evil in forming virtue, then wryly notes how families preserve our most diminishing memories, before the section closes with a brief affirmation of life’s beauty and worth. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

As a woman thinks