Though Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848), sister of Charlotte and Anne Brontë barely lived to age thirty, she produced one of the most beloved novels in the English canon — Wuthering Heights (1847). Following is a selection of quotes from Wuthering Heights that reflect the passionate and tumultuous nature of its characters.
One of the most influential of romantic novels, it touches on economic, social, and psychological issues. Then, of course, there is the obsessive love between Heathcliff and Cathy.
The brooding and complex story follows the intersection of two families — the Earnshaws and the Lintons. The passionate, almost otherworldly connection of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have sparked romantic imaginations as star-crossed lovers whose dramas and tragedies reverberate into the next generation. Read More→
Enid Bagnold, the British author and playwright is best known for the classic 1935 children’s novel National Velvet and The Chalk Garden, a dramatic play that opened on Broadway in 1955.
Regarded as prickly and perplexing, she left behind a modest yet significant body of work. Here we’ll look at a selection of quotes by Enid Bagnold, a complicated and perplexing woman.
Bagnold at first pursued her studies in art, but then changed direction when she went to work as a journalist for a magazine in 1911. Read More→
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 – 1935), an American author of fiction and nonfiction, is considered ahead of her time for her feminist works that pushed for women’s social and economic independence. Here is a selection of quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on human nature.
Best known for the 1892 semi-autobiographical work of short fiction, The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman was one of the leading voices of the late 19th and early 20th century American women’s movement.
Her nonfiction works, including Women and Economics (1898) and The Man-Made World (1911) detail how women’s lives were impacted by social and economic bias. Sadly they’re still relevant, which is why they’re still read and studied. Read More→
Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was published in 1898.
Far ahead of its time, Women and Economics held the position that humans are the only species in which the female depends on the male for her survival.
It’s considered one of Gilman’s finest works, though it hasn’t retained the renown of her semi-autobiographical short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. Read More→
Should a writer read reviews of her work, whether by actual critics, or reader reviewers? Back in the day, when book reviews resided quietly in print media, an author could consciously avoid reading reviews of her work.
Unless a loud-mouthed aunt or neighbor broadcast the verdict, one could remain blissfully unaware of others’ opinions, if one had that sort of discipline.
Carson McCullers said: “I never read my reviews. If they’re good, they might give me the big-head, and if they are unfavorable, I would be depressed. So why bother?”
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Have you ever heard of Edna Ferber? For most contemporary readers, the answer will be no. Her work was apparently of its time and place. Yet in that time and place (her prodigious output was concentrated mainly from the 1920s to the 1950s) her works were hugely popular, and financial gold mines.
Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1885. Her family moved around the midwest before settling in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she spent her teen years.
Her senior essays so impressed the editor of the Appleton Daily Crescent that he offered the 17-year-old Ferber a reporting job. And so, a career was born. Read More→
Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s short story The Giant Wistaria (1891) is less known than her classic, The Yellow Wallpaper. “Wistaria” has in common with “Wallpaper” the underlying themes of patriarchal repression of women’s sexuality and control of the realm of motherhood. What results is a chilling ghost story.
Presented here is the full text of The Giant Wistaria, written in 1891 under the name she was going by, Charlotte P. Stetson, just a year prior to the publication of The Yellow Wallpaper.
In analysis of The Giant Wistaria from Feminist Short Stories: Horror & Sci-Fi (Part 1), Jillian McKeown writes: Read More→
“How it Feels to Be Colored Me” is a brief essay by Zora Neale Hurston originally published in the 1928 edition of The World Tomorrow. In it, she explores her own experience with race, in her customary brash manner. She makes clear that she speaks only for herself.
Raised in the all-Black community of Eatonville, FL, Hurston first encountered what was universally called “the race problem” as a young adult striving to gain an education in the north.
The tone of this essay doesn’t reflect the kind of intellectual propagandist Black pride displayed in the Harlem Renaissance (also known as New Negro movement) of the 1920s; yet it unabashedly pokes holes in the rampant segregation and bias that were woven into the fabric of American life, North or South. Read More→
