Kate Douglas Wiggin (September 28, 1856 – August 24, 1923) was an American author best known for children’s stories, particularly Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Wiggin was also active as an educator; aside from having founded the first kindergarten in San Francisco, she and her sister established a school for training kindergarten teachers.
Born in Philadelphia, she and her sister moved to Portland, Maine with their widowed mother. Her education was sporadic and didn’t include college, though this wasn’t unusual for girls in her era. Her mother’s second husband had a health condition that took the family to the warmer climate of the west coast, and she found her milieu in California.
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Madeleine L’Engle (1918 – 2007) was a prolific writer of fantasy and science fiction for young adults and children of all ages. A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels are perhaps her best-known works.
It may come as a surprise to those who cherish this series that she had quite a hard time finding a publisher for it. “A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published,” L’Engle later reflected. “You can’t name a major publisher who didn’t reject it. When we’d run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up.” Read More→
Like many authors battered by continual rejection of a manuscript, L.M. Montgomery gave up and placed the worn Anne of Green Gables manuscript in a hatbox and gave up. After it languished in a freezing attic for nearly a year, Maud, as she was known to her familiars, decided to give it one more shot, sending it to Boston publisher L.C. Page.
Serendipitously, there she had an ally—a Prince Edward Island expatriate named Miss Arbuckle. One of the company’s readers, she was enchanted with the novel’s romanticized Island setting.
Miss Arbuckle “quietly and persistently championed Anne to the other staff readers until several supported the novel,” according to Maria Rubio in Writing a Life: L.M. Montgomery.
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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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