The historical setting of this diary offers us a glimpse of England at war through the eyes of a person who, though affected by it, did not cultivate political consciousness. Hunt emerges from her diary as a woman caught between unreconcilable forces: her desire for respectability and her pursuit of amorous sensation; her shrewd insight into her and Ford's character and her self-destructiveness in protracting a relationship she knows is doomed to failure; her self-dramatizing instinct, always ready to step back and watch herself in action, and her spontaneity; her pride and her abjectness; her wit and her sadness.