By Skyler Gomez | On October 14, 2019 | Updated May 27, 2024 | Comments (0)
Caroline Kirkland (full name Caroline Mathilda Stansbury Kirkland; January 11, 1801 – April 6, 1864) was an American essayist, writer, and educator, best known for her books examining the frontier settlement.
Her work as an editor demonstrated her strong commitment to realism in what she deemed acceptable for publication along with her critical skill in her reviews.
Caroline Stansbury was born into a middle-class family in New York City, the oldest of eleven siblings. Her mother was a writer of fictional stories and poetry, and her entire family had a love of reading. One of her greatest influences was her grandfather, Joseph Stansbury, who was an ardent Loyalist during the American Revolution. Read More→
By Marcie McCauley | On October 10, 2019 | Updated July 20, 2026 | Comments (2)
Barbara Pym (Barbara Mary Crampton Pym; June 2, 1913 – January 11, 1980) was a British author whose novels explored manners and morals in village life with a subtle, understated wit. She published nine novels in her lifetime and four books were published posthumously.
Much as Belinda turns the conversation to lighter topics in Barbara Pym’s first published novel, Some Tame Gazelle (1950), to avoid argument and taking things too seriously, Pym’s fiction appears to focus on lighter matters. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On September 24, 2019 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Kay Boyle (February 19, 1902 – December 27, 1992) was an American author of novels and short stories, and later in life, a political activist.
During her long and tumultuous life and prolific career, she produced almost forty volumes of work, including novels, short stories, essays, poems, plays, and children’s books. (photo above right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Much of her writing was autobiographical, drawing on a rich and colorful personal life — she married three times, had six children and two stepchildren, lived in Paris, Austria and Germany, and, in later years, was imprisoned twice for her political activism and opposition to the Vietnam War.
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By Skyler Gomez | On September 16, 2019 | Updated September 25, 2023 | Comments (0)
Rosario Castellanos (born Rosario Castellanos Figueroa; May 25, 1925 – August 7, 1974), author, poet, and diplomat, was one of Mexico’s most influential literary voices of the twentieth century.
This brief biography will examine her life and work, which dealt with issues of culture and gender in her home country, and which went on to influence contemporary Mexican feminist theory and cultural studies.
Castellanos was born in Mexico City and raised near her family’s ranch in Comitán in the southern state of Chiapas near the Guatemalan border. She was quite shy as a child and never completely felt part of her family. A soothsayer once told her mother that one of her two children would die, and she screamed, “Not the boy!”
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By Nava Atlas | On August 30, 2019 | Updated August 22, 2025 | Comments (0)
Radclyffe Hall (August 12, 1880 – October 7, 1943), British novelist and poet, is remembered as the author of groundbreaking lesbian literature; her most enduring work is the controversial 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness.
Hall’s struggles with love and gender identity worked their way into her fiction and contributed to a complicated, often unhappy life. (photo at right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Born in Bournemouth, Hampshire, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall’s father was a wealthy Englishman with the unusual moniker Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall, and her mother, Mary Jane Diehl, was American. Read More→
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