I was requested by some of the ladies to put a piece of cotton in my ears,"" wrote Ann Raney Coleman, describing her experiences in a ditch during the Civil War while Yankee shells exploded around her, ""but this I declined to do as I would rather hear all that was going on.""

Such charmingly understated comments abound in Victorian Lady on the Texas Frontier, the journal of a spunky girl who left England with her mother and sister to come to Texas in 1832. Anne Raney Coleman had a knack for being in the center of the action: the early preparations for the Texas struggle for independence, the Runaway Scrape, and the Federal attack on the Texas Gulf Coast in the Civil War. While boarding with Jane Long, ""the Mother of Texas,"" Mrs. Coleman associated with the McNeels and other leaders of the province, and she wrote of her experiences in a clear, energetic style - painting her characters sharply and with decided opinions about them all.