Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) might have lived the ideal writing life were it not for her lifelong struggle with mental illness. But this wasn’t the only source of anguish.
Surrounded by brilliant intellectuals in the Bloomsbury circle, she was also nurtured and protected by her husband, Leonard Woolf.
Yet she was relentlessly self-critical, restless, and rarely satisfied with her literary efforts. Perhaps that was what drove her to greatness, on the other hand. Read More→
The following 1940 interview with Pearl S. Buck is excerpted from Writers and Writing by Robert van Gelder, 1946: Pearl Buck says that in American life she has found a limitless reservoir of material for writing.
She never “became Chinese,” she always knew that she was American, yet her discovery of this country has had a certain Columbian freshness. (Photo at right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
The Good Earth was, in a way, “a pot-boiler,” written on “borrowed money and it had to be written at the time it was because I needed oh, a lot of money. Not just needed it. Had to have it.” Read More→
Excerpted from Writers and Writing by Robert van Gelder, 1946, an interview conducted with Porter in 1940: Katherine Anne Porter stated with evident surprise that her papers are now in order and in her own house.
Formerly she traveled a great deal with a suitcase for personal effects and a steamer trunk filled with manuscripts and notes. “Always I was up to my chin in paper.”
Now she has burned numerous short stories and four novels that she decided not to publish. But the material that she kept to work over is enough to occupy her well into her eighties. There are notes for novels, for a biography of Cotton Mather, and for some forty short stories.
Read More→
James Edward Austen-Leigh (1798 – 1874), a nephew of Jane Austen’s, first published A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869. Its second edition in 1871 was much expanded to include more letters and biographical material.
At this point in time, Jane Austen’s reputation was waning somewhat, and this publication is credited for having helped to revive her reputation.
In the narrative, Austen-Leigh describes the difficulties experienced by Austen’s family to secure publication for her early works. Indeed, during Jane’s lifetime, her successes were solid yet modest, and much of her work was published under the generic nom de plume “A Lady.” Read More→
This article by Charlotte Perkins Gilman originally appeared in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner. In it she answers the question posed by “many and many” a reader on why she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper. The 1892 long-form short story (or novella) became and remains a classic in feminist literature.
“Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” deals directly with the postpartum depression she suffered from, and her hopes that the story would enlighten other women who had similar experiences. Read More→
Rumer Godden was born in Sussex County, England, but spent the greater part of her childhood in India. The first of her books to be widely read in America was Black Narcissus (1939), her third novel. In This House of Brede , published three decades and many novels later, took her three years to write.
To facilitate and authenticate the gathering of her material, Miss Godden was allowed to live at the gates of a Benedictine monastery in England, and to have help and advice from the nuns.
Rumer Godden published many novels and several memoirs including such favorites as An Episode of Sparrows and The Greengage Summer, as well as short stories, poems, children’s books, and the autobiographical Two Under the Indian Sun and A House With Four Rooms. Read More→
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a novelist, poet, and social theorist whose ideas were quite provocative during her heyday as a lecturer, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Sample some of best-known feminist quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, following.
Charlotte resisted the marriage proposal of Charles Stetson, sensing that he wasn’t right for her. As it turned out, she was right.
Within the first year of their 1884 wedding, she gave birth to a daughter and fell into a serious bout of postpartum depression. It didn’t help that the prevailing attitudes that women were frail creatures prone to irrational hysteria. Read More→
