Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s reflections on a woman’s life were matured in active years of family living and stimulated by conversations with men and women who experience the same problems and feel the same need for assessing the true values of life.

The setting of her book is the sea shore; the time, a brief vacation which had lifted her from the distractions of everyday existence into the sphere of meditation.  As the sea tosses up its gifts – shells rare and perfect – so the mind, left to its ponderings, brings up its own treasures of the deep.  And the shells become symbols here for the various aspects of life she is contemplating.

In a blend of complete sincerity and delicacy, so uniquely her own, Anne Morrow Lindbergh shares with the reader her awareness of the many frustrating elements we face today: the restlessness, the unending pressures and demands, the denial of leisure and silence, the threat to inner peace and integration, the uneasy balance of the opposites, man and woman.  With radiant lucidity she makes visible again the values of the inner life, without which there is no true fulfillment.  She does this without the overtones of preaching, but herself as a seeker, echoing – only clearer and stronger – our own small still voice.