Elizabeth Gaskell (née Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson, September 29, 1810 – November 12, 1865) was a British author known for short stories and novels focusing on social classes.
In literary circles and beyond, she was often referred to simply as “Mrs. Gaskell.”
The upheaval of class boundaries, the industrialization of England, religion, and women’s issues in the Victorian era were all themes of her work. Elizabeth’s mother died a year or so after giving birth to her. Her father, a Unitarian minister, wasn’t able to care for her, so she was sent to live with an aunt. Read More→
“Sweet Lorraine” is a (platonic) love letter and tribute to Lorraine Hansberry by her friend and colleague, James Baldwin. It opens her posthumous book of collected writings, To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969). Both were relatively young artists when they first met in the winter of 1958.
Lorraine, then 28, came to the Actors’ Studio where the stage version of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room was being workshopped. He was then 34. Both were aware of one another’s work, and Lorraine would soon go on to defend her new friend Jimmy’s charge to introduce theater audiences to Black and queer themes. Read More→
Anna Sewell (March 30, 1820 – April 25, 1878) was a British novelist who had only one published book — Black Beauty — to her name.
But what a book it is — a timeless classic that has enthralled generations of readers with its message of compassion toward animals.
Anna was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk in England, into a family that was devoutly Quaker. Her mother, Mary Wright Sewell (who outlived her daughter by a few years) was herself an author of poetry and children’s books. Read More→
The Song of the Lark is a 1915 novel by Willa Cather, telling the story of Thea Kronborg and her desire to be a world-class singer. Born into the family of a Swedish Methodist minister in a Colorado village, she has a voice, an ambition, and a native sense of the true and fine — qualities all in contrast with the cheapness and tawdriness she perceives around her.
From her girlhood, when her ambition takes hold, to her triumph as a prima donna at thirty, Thea’s whole life is focused around her supreme desire for artistic perfection. Willa Cather had already outlined this novel, having had an interest in opera.
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Aphra Behn (December 14, 1640 –April 16, 1689) was a playwright, poet, and novelist known for being the first British woman to earn her living by her writing.
Born in Wye, Kent, England, as a child she was taken to Suriname (presumably by her parents), which at the time was an English possession.
While there, Aphra discovered the legend of the African prince Oroonoko and his beloved Imoinda. This later inspired what became her best-known novel, Oroonoko. She also has the distinction of being the first British woman to earn her living by her writing.
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To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in her Own Words is a 1969 collection of autobiographical writings by the playwright and author best known for A Raisin in the Sun. The latter was the first play written by an African-American woman to be staged on Broadway.
Lorraine Hansberry‘s ex-husband and dear friend, the songwriter and poet Robert Nemiroff, became her literary executor after her death in 1965.
He gathered her unpublished writings and first adapted them into a stage play, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which ran off Broadway from 1968 to 1969. The play was one of the most critically acclaimed and successful of that season and continues to be performed around the world. Read More→
“Renascence” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950) is the 1912 poem that put this iconic American poet on the literary map. Though it was published when she was just nineteen, it held up as one of the best poems in her canon. You can find an excellent analysis of it on Poetry Foundation.
The 214-line lyric poem consists of rhymed couplets. The overarching theme is the connection of the individual to nature. The narrator of the poem is writing from a mountaintop from which she observes the broad vista; observation becomes a mystical experience.
The poem was written on the summit of Mt. Battle in Camden, Maine, which now has a plaque in the spot that inspired its lines. Read More→
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an American novelist and memoirist best known for The Yearling (1938), the story of a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, and the hard choices that ensue.
The Yearling won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939 and was made into a successful movie in 1946.
Rawlings is also known for her writings about her adopted home in Cross Creek, Florida, where she bought an orange grove in the late 1920s and lived for many decades. Read More→
