“I get both my tests back today. I think & I’m really excited. I think I did pretty good,” Janis Joplin wrote to her boyfriend in 1965.

Living at home in Texas while attending community college, the fledgling musician continued:

“My guitar playing is growing by leaps and bounds. . . . I really wail on it. If you can call it wailing when you do it all alone in your bedroom w/your doors closed. . . . I wish I had fans that thought I was as good as I do.”

Opening Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler’s remarkable collection “Women’s Letters: America From the Revolutionary War to the Present” (Dial Press, $35) is like finding a chest full of letters written by famous, not-yet famous and ordinary women who, in chatty, informative missives, reveal pieces of their lives – and life itself – during important moments in history.

'Women's Letters'

The book begins with a letter sent by horseback on April 18, 1776, from Rachel Revere to her husband, Paul Revere, warning him to “not attempt coming in to this town again” because it was unsafe. The collection ends with an e-mail exchange on March 2003 between a woman in Kentucky and her soldier husband in Iraq.

Arranged chronologically, the 400 letters include many written by famous women, including Abigail Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Jacqueline Kennedy. But the more interesting ones are those by little-known or soon-to-be-known women, like Joplin, who rocketed to stardom at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

Reading “Women’s Letters” is like sitting down with women of another time over a cup of tea. They lived, endured and witnessed a world very different from ours, yet their newsy, heart-to-heart letters reveal that when it comes down to it, they were not that much different from women today.