From the original review of The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley in the Bridgeport Post Sun, April 1959: A collection of short stories is relatively unusual as a literary debut, but in the case of Grace Paley the choice was by and large justified.
Virtually all of these ten stories center around love and they are written in a style that is an odd mixture of matter of factness, subdued sentimentality, and hyperbole.
Love, the author seems to suggest most of the time, is really a pretty funny business, and the best way to approach it is to appear hardboiled, while hiding a smile up one’s emotional sleeve. Read More→
Just like the rest of us, famed writers loved their furry companions, amply illustrated by this roundup of classic women authors and their dogs.
Dogs, cats, and other companion animals (bunnies, domesticated birds, etc.) bring comfort and joy in good times and bad and can be good company whether the writing is flowing or comes with difficulty. At right, the young Beatrix Potter with her four-legged friend.
The unwavering love and devotion of dogs are much welcomed in a profession that can sometimes be lonely.
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Radclyffe Hall (1880 – 1943) was a British author best known for her groundbreaking novel, The Well of Loneliness. It’s often described as the story of young woman’s coming to terms with her lesbian identity, but it’s more than that.
It’s also about a person born with a female body making sense of her maleness. It was certainly ahead of its time in expressing the concept of gender dysphoria without the vocabulary available today. Radclyffe Hall, in real life, wore male clothing, preferred to be called “John,” and wanted to be accepted by society as male.
Radclyffe Hall described herself as a “congenital invert,” a term that came from early 20th-century sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing and refers to a type of inborn gender reversal where women could be born with a masculine soul and vice versa — in contemporary terms, what is referred to as transgender. Read More→
The Age of Innocence, a 1920 novel by Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937), is considered one of her finest. It earned her a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921, which made her the first woman to win this award.
The story centers on Newland Archer, an upper-class New Yorker in the 1870s. Central to the narrative is Archer’s conflicted desires between duty to his staid but loving wife and his passion for scandal-plagued Countess Ellen Olenska, a divorcée.
Edith Wharton grew up and lived in a similarly charmed world of wealth, one that could protect its inhabitants from everything but heartache. Read More→
Librivox is a free resource for audio versions of classic literature that you can download onto your devices or simply listen to from your browser. These audio readings of public domain literature are read by volunteers, so they’re more variable than the kinds of audiobooks read by professional actors.
Librivox offers audio versions of many classic books that are otherwise unavailable. You can search by author or title; while of course, there are many classics by male authors available, for the purposed of this site, we’re here to promote classics by women.
Here’s a list of literary ladies whose novels, short fiction, and poetry have been recorded for Librivox.org. Not all the authors’ bibliographies are complete, so if you notice a public domain work that’s not there, perhaps you can volunteer to create an audio version!
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From the review of Crucial Conversations by May Sarton in The Carroll Daily Times Herald, May, 1975: This reviewer found this an utterly satisfying novel because it has lovely language and many messages that tickle the intellect or warm the heart.
May Sarton is a poet of note, also a novelist; she has lived a long time, been a perceptive observer and is a wise woman.
The story is a far cry from blood and thunder and bizarre sexual encounters. Its format is a series of conversations between sensitive people about marriage and divorce and finding oneself. Read More→
Ethan Frome (1911) by Edith Wharton is a slim but emotionally impactful novel. Subtly and haunting, it keeps the reader’s attention despite the somber storyline.
Make sure to read Edith Wharton’s own introduction to the novel, which begins:
“I had known something of New England village life long before I made my home in the same county as my imaginary Starkfield; though, during the years spent there, certain of its aspects became much more familiar to me.
Even before that final initiation, however, I had had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little — except a vague botanical and dialectical — resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had seen.” Read More→
Pavilion of Women by Pearl S. Buck (1946) is a gem of a novel telling the story of the spiritual and intellectual awakening of Madame Wu, a pampered wife of the wealthy House of Wu. She announces to her husband that on the occasion of her fortieth birthday, she wishes to withdraw from their physical life as a couple.
Madame Wu beseeches her husband to take a second wife to serve him as the patriarch of one of the oldest and most prestigious households in China.
She herself carries out the arrangement, and withdraws to her own rooms to read books and live a life of the mind, something she never had the luxury to do as her sons grew up. Read More→
