For French author George Sand (1804-1876), motherhood was often fraught with the kind of drama that colored many of her relationships prior to mellow older age. Her son Maurice was a major mama’s boy, causing petty jealousy for Sand’s most famed live-in lover, Frederic Chopin.
Could it have been from spite that he unconsciously (or not so unconsciously) fell in love with Sand’s daughter, Solange, when she was a pretty and flirtatious young lady of seventeen? Read More→
If ever an author failed to anticipate the public’s response to one of her own books, it was Edna Ferber when she was writing So Big. Fourteen years after the remarkable success of So Big by Edna Ferber, she confessed:
“I never dreamed that So Big would be popular. I wrote it against my judgment … I wrote my book because I wanted to write it more than anything else in the world … Not only did I not plan to write a best seller when I wrote So Big, I thought, when I had finished it, that I had written the world’s worst seller …” Read More→
The first American book that claimed the distinction of “international best seller” was Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 – 1896). Not only was she the first female author to achieve this milestone, but the first author ever. Here we’ll find out how she was inspired to write her most iconic work.
After the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, no book sold faster right from the start. One and a half million copies were sold worldwide by the end of its first year in print, and in the entire nineteenth century, only the Bible sold more copies.
The book not only helped change the course of history, but changed the business of publishing as it was known. Read More→
Motherhood and writing aren’t always compatible, but more women are making it work today. In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s time, it was manifold times more difficult.
I wish I had known about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s life of motherhood and writing when my children were growing up. Her experiences of raising a family in the mid-1800s put the usual gamut of mom-ish complaints into perspective, especially as she burned with the desire to write as a means of social protest.
Ultimately, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book she’s best known for, was the 19th century’s biggest international bestseller (after the Bible) and actually went a long way to changing public attitudes toward slavery. Read More→
Middlemarch: A Story of Provincial Life by George Eliot is considered by some this esteemed British author’s masterpiece. This is saying a lot, since she produced a number of books that are masterworks in their own right, including The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, and Daniel Deronda.
The 1996 Barnes and Noble edition of Middlemarch offered this succinct summary of the novel, which was originally released in volumes spanning 1871 to 1872: Read More→
In Thunder and Lightening: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft, Natalie Goldberg offers advice on how to find time to write. She suggests structuring your time — strictly! Be precise, set your writing time up in advance, and take that time commitment seriously:
“Open those date books that Americans are so fond of and schedule in writing time, and be realistic. If you have a busy week, don’t beat yourself up for not being able to write every day. As a matter of fact, don’t ever say you’ll write every day because when you don’t — and I promise you, there will be days you won’t — you’ll hate yourself. Read More→
Eudora Welty (1909 – 2001) was just as avid a reader as she was a writer. It isn’t hard to see how reading thoughtfully can make one a better thinker and writer.
Welty won numerous awards for her writing, among them, a Pulitzer Prize (for The Optimist’s Daughter, 1973 — which many critics considered her best novel), an American Book Award, National Medal for Literature, and The Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was a six-time winner of the O. Henry Award for Short Stories.
Welty dispensed gentle wisdom on the subject of how being a good writer is intertwined with the love of reading. Here are several of her ideas on the art of reading gathered from her nonfiction books, notably On Writing and One Writer’s Beginnings. Read More→
From her disapproving mother and wayward husband to her snooty society friends, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) lived in a social milieu that reinforced her deep insecurity and sense of non-belonging, both as a woman and as a writer.
Her first tentative steps into the literary world, the place she most longed to be, met with steady acceptance and success that took her by surprise. It took quite some doing before Wharton believed she was worthy of it.
The publication of Wharton’s first collection of fictional short stories, The Greater Inclination, seemed to turn the tide as she finally accepted herself as a professional writer and not a dilettante. Read More→
