By Francis Booth | On July 15, 2021 | Updated August 2, 2021 | Comments (0)
Charlotte Lennox (c. 1730 – 1804), née Barbara Charlotte Ramsay, was an English novelist, playwright, and poet best remembered for her 1752 novel, The Female Quixote. This introduction to her life and work is excerpted from Killing the Angel: Early Transgressive British Woman Writers by Francis Booth ©2021, reprinted by permission.
Charlotte had a peripatetic early life. Born in Gibraltar, the daughter of a Scottish captain in the British Army, she lived her first ten years in England before moving to Albany in New York, where her father was Lieutenant Governor.
After her father’s death in 1742, Charlotte remained in New York with her mother until, at age thirteen, she was sent to London to a companion to her aunt. Her aunt, however, seems to have been mentally unstable, so Charlotte became companion to the unmarried courtier Lady Isabella Finch, cousin of the poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On July 7, 2021 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (2)
Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour (June 8, 1903 – December 17, 1987) was a French short story writer, novelist and essayist known as Marguerite Yourcenar.
Best known for her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, she was the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française.
From the beginning of World War II, she lived in the United States with her partner, the American professor Grace Frick. She took American citizenship and died in Maine at the age of eighty-four. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On June 20, 2021 | Updated September 6, 2026 | Comments (0)
Antonia White (born Eirene Botting, March 31, 1899 – April 10, 1980) was a British author best known for her autobiographical novel Frost in May.
In addition to producing other novels and short stories, she was an accomplished translator from French to English.
Her well-documented struggles with mental health resulted in her being committed to an asylum in her early twenties, an experience that she used as the basis for some of her fiction. Other notable themes in both her life and work were religion, particularly Catholicism, and her difficult relationship with her father and daughters. Read More→
By Lynne Weiss | On June 3, 2021 | Updated April 5, 2024 | Comments (0)
May Sinclair, (born Mary Amelia St. Clair Sinclair; August 24, 1863 – November 14, 1946) was a British novelist, philosopher, poet, and suffragist who was regarded as England’s “leading woman novelist between the death of George Eliot and the rise of Virginia Woolf,” according to David Williams, a critic who wrote for Punch.
She explored the inner lives of ordinary women in some twenty-three novels, while also publishing two works of philosophy, a biography of the Brontës, several collections of poetry, and dozens of short stories.
May Sinclair is largely forgotten today. All of her works had fallen out of print when Virago Press, the noted British feminist publishing house, reissued three of her most significant novels in the early 1980s. At present, however, only The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922), which many regard as her masterpiece, is in print. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On May 18, 2021 | Updated October 13, 2024 | Comments (0)
Mina Loy (December 27, 1882 – September 25, 1966) was a brilliant English-born poet, playwright, and artist. Light years ahead of her time, she was lauded by her peers for her dense analyses of the female experience in early twentieth-century Western society.
She was associated with other great minds and literary innovators of her time, like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Beach, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and others. Read More→
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