By Emma Ward | On October 12, 2017 | Updated May 8, 2023 | Comments (0)
Tillie Olsen (1912 – 2007) was born in Nebraska to Russian-Jewish immigrants whose socialist politics and activism inspired her work. Following is a selection of quotes by Tillie Olsen.
Olsen wrote her first novel, Yonnondio: From the Thirties, at the age of 19 while she was helping support her family, though it wasn’t published until some years later.
Olsen felt she didn’t fulfill her potential as a writer, spending many years raising four daughters. She poured some of that frustration into what’s now considered a feminist nonfiction classic, Silences (1978). Perhaps her best known work is the short story Tell Me a Riddle. Read More→
By Emma Ward | On October 8, 2017 | Updated September 1, 2025 | Comments (0)
Jean Rhys is best known for her last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, what modern critics consider a post-colonial response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Rhys’ novels are characterized by reoccurring themes of exile, loss, alienation, sexual inequality, and enslavement influenced by her identity as a Dominican woman.
Jean found writing difficult and expressed that she would rather be happy than be a writer. She returned to Dominica only once, in 1936, visiting her grandfather’s plantation.
The estate and his possessions destroyed during the 1844 “Census Riots” / ”La Guerre Negre.” The house itself had been burned down by arsonists in 1930, a tragedy Jean integrated into Wide Sargasso Sea. Read More→
By Emma Ward | On October 6, 2017 | Updated October 18, 2024 | Comments (6)
May Sarton was a highly respected American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Her literature encompasses themes of aging, solitude, and family and romantic relationships. Presented here is a selection of introspective quotes by May Sarton, a most thoughtful writer.
Self-identified as a lesbian and regarded as a feminist, she preferred that her work found a place in a broad humanitarian connection rather than within the identities she embodied.
Her memoir, Journal of a Solitude (1973) was her most popular work, and “Now I Become Myself” is one of her most beloved poems. She was also the author of numerous novels. Read More→
By Emma Ward | On October 4, 2017 | Updated December 6, 2022 | Comments (0)
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Yearling (1939), the story of a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn. The jewel in the crown of her writing career, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was subsequently made into a successful movie.
Early in her career, while attempting to get her fiction published in magazines, Rawlings supporting herself through newspaper work. She honed her craft as a newspaper reporter.
And like other authors who started out this way (including Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, and L.M. Montgomery), she longed to take her writing in a more artistic direction. At first, all she collected were rejection slips. Read More→
By Emma Ward | On October 3, 2017 | Updated December 7, 2022 | Comments (0)
Vita Sackville-West (1892 – 1962) the British novelist, poet, and garden writer, was best known for All Passion Spent and The Edwardians. Presented here are quotes by Vita Sackville-West that are a testament to her as a thinker and writer.
Where passion was concerned, she was involved in a number of intense affairs with both men and women (including, famously, Virginia Woolf).
All the while, she was in a loving open marriage with diplomat Harold Nicolson, with whom she had two sons. She was also devoted to the gardens at her ancestral home, Sissinghurst. Read More→
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