Natalia Ginzburg (July 14, 1916 – October 7, 1991) is considered among the best Italian writers of the post-World War II generation. Her vast literary legacy of novels, essays, plays, and nonfiction captures the devastation endured by war survivors.
In her works, the reader is struck by the imagery and near lyricism as she describes the mundane details and personal catastrophes that define life under political oppression. It has been said of Ginzburg that she “wrote like a man,” given that she was unsentimental in portraying the historic, violent traumas she witnessed. Read More→
After reading a memoir of high-risk pregnancy by a friend (more about that ahead), I got to thinking about the prevalence of pregnancy in classic novels by women authors as a central theme.
Of course, there are many instances of female characters in novels (both by male and female authors) bearing a child or miscarrying, but pregnancy itself is rarely more than quickly touched upon.
Birth control methods were unreliable until relatively recently in human development; yet novels centering on pregnancy, other than the seduction and abandonment trope, aren’t all that common. Her First Time: Seduction and Loss of Innocence in 1920s Women’s Novels presents several classic titles in which the heroine becomes pregnant (usually outside of marriage), with various outcomes. Read More→
Women’s flapper novels of the 1920s captured the essence of a fleeting era known as the Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties. This look at a largely forgotten genre of fiction, many written by women, is excerpted from A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth ©2022. Reprinted by permission.
The 1920s was the age of the flapper — the free, single, modern woman unencumbered by long skirts or long hair who could go anywhere, do anything; she did not have to settle for what her mother had to settle for.
She could change her life and entire social and economic situation, if only through marriage, and even change her physical appearance. The Flapper magazine, with its slogan “not for old fogeys,” was based in Vera Caspary’s hometown of Chicago and started in 1922. The opening issue made its stance clear. Read More→
Alice Guy-Blaché (July 1, 1873 – March 24, 1968) was a pioneering filmmaker of the early days of cinema, and the first woman to direct a film. One of the first filmmakers to make a narrative film, she was the only known female filmmaker in the world from 1896 to 1906.
Guy-Blaché directed, produced, or supervised about a thousand films, many of them short. When she died in 1968, many of her accomplishments had been erased from male-dominated film history books, but recent years have seen a revival of interest in her life and work. Read More→
Vera Caspary (1899– 1987) was a remarkably prolific American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Over the course of her long career, she became known as a writer of crime fiction, though she created works in other genres.
With more than twenty novels published (plus others left unpublished), the best known remains Laura (1943). She also wrote long short stories and novellas, not to mention numerous screenplays for Hollywood films, some based on her own works.
Many of her works featured young, forward-thinking women (then called “career girls”) who fought for female autonomy and equality, and refused male protection. Read More→
The newly built Los Angeles suburb of Paradise in Vera Caspary’s 1961 novel Bachelor in Paradise is rather like the aspirational estate of Northridge in Caspary’s earlier story “Stranger in the House” (1943). Excerpted from A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth ©2022. Reprinted by permission.
“It is one of those suburbs distinguished in real-estate advertisements by the word exclusive. The residents spend large sums to separate themselves from neighbors whom they meet as often as possible at the Country Club . . . Pedestrians are seldom seen.”
It is also somewhat similar to the setting of Grace Metalious’s 1956 novel Peyton Place (1956), with its simmering suburban sexual tensions among the “simple, well-constructed, one-family dwellings, most of them modeled on Cape Cod lines and painted white with green trim” and to Pepper Street in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall (1948), also set in a California suburb. Read More→
Marita Odette Bonner (1899 – 1971) was a short story writer, playwright, and essayist. Between 1925 and 1927 she produced a great number of short stories featuring characters from varied cultures navigating urban life. She became noted for two prize-winning essays — “On Being Young—A Woman—and Colored” (1925), presented here, and “Drab Rambles” (1927).
One of the earliest Black students at Radcliffe College, she was academically talented as well as a gifted pianist and composer. Upon her 1922, graduation, when she was named “Radcliffe’s Beethoven,” Bonner continued to blossom, becoming a noted figure in the Harlem Renaissance movement.
In the late 1920s, Bonner wrote three plays, the best known of which was The Purple Flower (1928). Her writings often dealt with the challenges of being Black in a racist society, a theme exemplified in the essay that follows. Read More→
In the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s, and the years just before and after, a notable number of Black women made a name for themselves as writers, playwrights, poets, editors, and journalists.
Here, we’ll take a look at eight Black women playwrights of the early twentieth century. For further in-depth overviews of Black women playwrights of the early twentieth century, consult these sources: Read More→
