By Skyler Gomez | On December 30, 2020 | Updated July 15, 2024 | Comments (4)
Marilyn French (November 21, 1929 – May 2, 2009) was an American author and radical feminist activist best known for her debut novel, The Women’s Room.
French wrote many other controversial works after The Women’s Room made her a literary star in the modern feminist movement.
Born Marilyn Edwards in Brooklyn, New York, she was the daughter of third-generation Polish immigrants. Her father, E. Charles Edwards was an engineer and her mother, Isabel Hazz Edwards, was a department store clerk. Read More→
By Melanie P. Kumar | On December 25, 2020 | Updated August 29, 2022 | Comments (0)
Kamala Das (1934 – 2009) started her career as a poet writing under the name of Madhavi Kutty. The renowned Indian author was bilingual and wrote in her mother tongue, Malayalam, as well as in English.
Born in Punnayurkulam, India as Kamala Surayya, she was better known in her home state of Kerala for her short stories and her autobiography, and in the rest of the country, for her English poetry.
Her explosive autobiography, My Story, written in Malayalam (her native tongue), gained her both fame and notoriety. Later, it was translated into English. Read More→
By Marcie McCauley | On December 16, 2020 | Updated February 7, 2026 | Comments (0)
Winifred Holtby (June 23, 1898 – September 29, 1935) was an accomplished British author, journalist, and activist. Best known for her posthumously published novel, South Riding (1936), she had published six novels in her lifetime, and fourteen books in total.
She also had a successful career in journalism and wrote the first critical study of Virginia Woolf in English. During her lifetime, her fame derived from her work for prominent newspapers and magazines, including the feminist publication Time and Tide.
Winifred wrote about democracy and social welfare, feminism and pacifism, education and responsibility, racism and injustice. After her death, her fame grew with the publication of Testament of Friendship (1940), written by her lifelong friend, Vera Brittain. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On November 29, 2020 | Updated November 14, 2021 | Comments (0)
Helen Hunt Jackson (born Helen Maria Fiske, October 15, 1830 – August 12, 1885), was an American novelist, poet, and writer of nonfiction. She gained fame as an advocate of Native Americans, using her pen and her voice to expose their disgraceful treatment by the U.S. government.
Her best-known novel, Ramona (1884), called attention to the mistreatment of Native Americans, much as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1882) raised awareness of the evils of slavery.
Though Ramona is no longer as widely known as the latter, it was hugely successful in its time, going through hundreds of editions. And though the intent behind both Ramona and Uncle Tom’s Cabin could smack of white saviorism, they were the most widely read “moral novels” of the 19th century. The two authors fervently believed in the causes that propelled their writings. Read More→
By Skyler Gomez | On November 9, 2020 | Updated March 23, 2025 | Comments (0)
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga (March 23, 1814 – February 1, 1873), a Cuban-born Spanish writer, was considered one of the most romantic writers and greatest women poets of the 19th century.
Avellaneda was born in Santa Maria de Puerto Principe, currently known as Camagüey. Upon arriving in Cuba in 1905, her father, Manuel Gómez de Avellaneda y Gil de Taboada was a Spanish naval officer in charge of the port of Nuevitas.
Her mother, Francisca María del Rosario de Arteaga y Betancourt, was a criolla and a member of the wealthy Arteaga y Betancourt family, one of the most high-ranking families in Puerto Principe. Gertrudis was the first-born of the couple’s five children, but only she and her younger brother, Manuel, survived past childhood.
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