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→
By Emma Ward | On October 2, 2017 | Updated April 23, 2023 | Comments (0)
Dodie Smith (1896 – 1990), the British novelist playwright, was best known for The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) and her young adult novel I Capture the Castle. Following is a selection of colorful quotes from I Capture the Castle (1948).
I Capture the Castle features sisters Rose and Cassandra Mortmain, members of an eccentric family living in genteel poverty in a crumbling castle in the 1930s. This coming-of-age story has been beloved by readers of all ages ever since it was published in 1948. Critics were kind as well, as in the words of this original 1948 review:
“Finding out what happens makes rewarding reading. This is a captivating — an enchanting story, bit it is also shrewd commentary on life and art and the complexity of the human heart.” Read More→
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