Literary Ladies Guide

The latest biography from historian Judith Lissauer Cromwell, Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: Portrait of an Artist, 1755–1842 (McFarland, 2025), follows the remarkable life of this painter whose portraits of European royalty and nobility hang in many of the world’s most important museums.

As a young woman in the male-dominated society of 18th-century France, Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was denied an artistic education and forced to nurture her passion outside of conventional schooling. Vigée Le Brun’s vibrant art, in addition to her charm and beauty, caught the attention of Queen Marie-Antoinette, who honored her as her chosen painter.

At the pinnacle of her fame and fortune, however, the Revolution forced Vigée Le Brun to flee, leaving everything behind except her only child, a daughter. Read More→

Johanna Spyri and Frances Hodgson Burnett illustrate the effects of nature on well-being through the symbolism and imagery of nature in their novels, Heidi and The Secret Garden. In both of these beloved classic novels, the authors show how the characters’ interactions with nature sets them on transformative journeys that help heal physical ailments and mental distress.

Spyri’s Heidi (1881) follows a young girl who has lost her parents and is taken to the Swiss Alps to stay with her grandfather. Mary Bernath, literature professor at Bloomsburg State University, writes that “Heidi’s home in the Alps is an idyllic place, far from the modern world and its concerns.”

After a short time, she is sent to the city of Frankfurt to be a companion to Klara, a slightly older girl who is unable to walk. While in Frankfurt, Heidi falls ill and yearns to return to the natural world of the Alps. Read More→

Despite the challenges and pressures that Palestinian women writers have historically faced from displacement, occupation, and societal pressures, prominent writers have emerged steady and strong, whether in Palestine or exiled in the diaspora. Poet Fadwa Tuqan (1917 – 2003) was one of these women. 

Palestinian women writers, like other women writers across the globe, did not have it easy, especially those who lived through the Nakba. This was the 1948 catastrophe when more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from historical Palestine (modern day Israel) to Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

Added to this displacement were societal pressure and cultural norms that put women at a disadvantage compared to their male peers. Read More→

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, 1931 – 2019) is celebrated for her groundbreaking novels and nonfiction that examine the Black experience in America.

Her writings have reached millions of readers, and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for the “visionary force and poetic import” of her work. [above right, Toni Morrison’s author photo on The Bluest Eye, 1970; photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

Following is an overview of her career as an editor and publisher, which isn’t as widely known despite being hugely influential in the contemporary realm of Black literature and the publishing world. Read More→

This article is reprinted with permission from Feminism for All. Women were oppressed in patriarchal civilizations the world over. And women the world refused those systems and structures. Women the world over rose up in rebellion against their oppression.

They chaffed against the private domestic sphere before leaving it. They found ways to acquire knowledge that was forbidden to their sex and gender. They defied the odds to take ruling power from men, or ruled alongside and equal to their husbands. (Shown above right, Pandita Ramabai.)

During the colonial/imperialist era, they joined and were welcomed into anti-colonialist movements. Later, they came to together and forged feminist movements to throw off the shackles of domination and oppression that tried to contain and silence them. Read More→

Chief Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa (1931 – 1993, familiarly known as Flora Nwapa, was a Nigerian-born author, poet, short story writer, and activist.

She was known as the “Mother of African Literature,” and was the first African woman author whose writing published in England.

Here’s more about her writing, including the influences behind her debut novel, Efuru. Read More→

Who would have ever imagined that librarians would become targets in contemporary culture wars? Most of today’s battles are over banning and censorship, as we know. (Shown at right, Belle da Costa Greene)

And though book banning is nothing new, it wasn’t the primary concern of the librarians highlight here today. They were blazing trails in other ways (you’ll frequently see “the first” here). All of these professionals were visionaries who elevated the role of libraries as cultural hearts of communities.

These librarians proudly built diversity and cultural awareness into the fabric of what has evolved into the contemporary library. And that’s something that can’t be unraveled. Read More→

Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poetry was first published in NAACP’s The Crisis in 1916, and was subsequently included in the premier Black journals and anthologies of the 1920s. Georgia was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. Presented here is the full text of An Autumn Love Cycle, her third collection, published in 1928.

Though Black women’s poetry was regularly featured in the era’s periodicals, an entire collection by one writer was a rarity. Georgia published three poetry collections in the span of six years; one more was to come decades later.

Her first collection, The Heart of a Woman (1918) featured poems both specific to Georgia’s life yet universal to the female experience, speaking of love, loneliness, and women’s constrained roles. Decades later, the title of this book (and its eponymous poem) would inspire Maya Angelou’s 1981 memoir of the same name. Read More→