Literary Ladies Guide

Some years before her death, renowned poet, professor, and activist Nikki Giovanni wrote, “I hope I die warmed by the life I tried to live.”

Giovanni’s hope and vision have been realized. When she passed away on December 9, 2024, she was surrounded by the boundless love of her wife, Virginia Fowler, her son Thomas, and her granddaughter Kai.

Nikki Giovanni was eighty-one years old when she died of complications from cancer, her third diagnosis of the disease. Despite this tremendous physical challenge, Ms. Giovanni continued to write, speak, teach, and publish throughout the last decade of her life. Read More→

The work of feminist writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–1797) has endured, despite attempts of critics of her time to bury her legacy after her death. A year after she died, her husband, William Godwin, published Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, unwittingly turning the public against the love of his life.

Two generations later, however, women rediscovered Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing — breathing new life into a historical figure who might have been forgotten along with other notable women whose words were lost to the patriarchy.   

William Godwin meant no harm when he published his memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1798. Mired in grief, he wanted the world to know Mary the way he did— as a compassionate, brilliant woman. Read More→

Zelda Fitzgerald was an American author, artist, and socialite. Although she is best remembered as the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she was a talented writer and artist in her own right, which caused the couple a great deal of conflict.

Zelda wrote one novel (Save Me the Waltz) and an unstaged play, Scandalabra. What is less known is that she wrote various articles for periodicals, including College Humor, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New York Tribune. Here, we’ll take a closer look at five of these little-known features. Read More→

It’s incredible (and sad) that we’re still grappling with the same issues presented in these five 1920s novels by women writers. Four of them fell out of print and were rediscovered and reissued decades later; one has never gone out of print. It’s wonderful that all are available in fresh new or recent editions.

In these reissues, fascinating new introductions, forewords, or afterwords re-introduce these writers aren’t known enough and/or shouldn’t have been forgotten in the first place: Ursula Parrott, Radclyffe Hall, Anzia Yezierska, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay famously wrote, it’s not one damn thing after another, it’s the same damn thing, over and over. One hundred years or so after these books came out, we’re still grappling with their central themes in the culture and in personal lives. And while that’s frustrating, it’s also why these novels are still relevant to contemporary readers. Read More→

Djuna Barnes was a Modernist writer whose various talents and eccentricities made her unique. She went to great lengths to protect her privacy, so it’s not surprising that she had a whole closet full of skeletons. These fascinating facts about Djuna Barnes are presented by Jon Macy, creator of the graphic novel Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes. 

Childhood trauma armored Djuna with a razor sharp wit, and an almost Ahab-and-the-whale, determination to succeed as a writer. Immensely talented, she was a journalist, poet, artist and novelist.

She became a celebrated star in 1920s Paris along with her friends James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Her masterpiece, Nightwood, is one of the greatest lesbian novels ever written, and her influence on modern writers reverberates into the present. Read More→

Once the most renowned ex-wife in America, bestselling author Ursula Parrott (1899 – 1957) was routinely described as “famous” in her lifetime when the press covered her new books, Hollywood deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law. 

As I detail in Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, she published twenty books from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, several of them bestsellers, and over one hundred short stories, articles, and novel-length magazine serials. 

Ursula Parrott piloted for the Civilian Air Corps during World War II; co-founded a weekly rural Connecticut newspaper with a group including American Newspaper Guild founder Heywood Broun and her literary agent George Bye; was an informant in a federal drug investigation; and travelled the world, including an extended story-collecting trip to Russia in the 1930s. And between all her writing and other adventures, she married (and divorced) four times. Read More→

A few months ago, I was helping pack up my father’s house because, at age ninety-two, he was moving to a retirement home. He had always been a great reader and bibliophile, so we had to go through his library and decide what we would keep and what we would give away. I stumbled on an old paperback of Rosemunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers, which must have belonged to Dad’s late girlfriend. 

Published in 1987, The Shell Seekers was an international bestseller. I hadn’t read it in decades and had forgotten what a jewel of a book it was – a 500-page tome of a family saga. Rereading it around a recent Christmastime, I couldn’t wait to go upstairs in the evening and delve back into its pages  despite being surrounded by family and friends,   

The Shell Seekers has beautiful descriptions and many memorable characters. The story reflects the tapestry of life — good times and bad, heartbreak, and passion. Read More→

To write a great novel (or even a decent one), it seems that a writer should have a certain amount of life experience. But that’s not always the case — not in the past, and not in the present. Following are seven novels written when their authors were precocious young women — some still in their teens.

Some have become iconic classics; others sold in the millions are forgotten bestsellers.

So, what of it? Maybe the point is that if you have a story inside of you, find a way to tell it no matter what your age — tender through advanced. It may not become a classic or a bestseller or even be published, but at least will be something to build on. Read More→