By Taylor Jasmine | On March 23, 2015 | Updated March 17, 2023 | Comments (0)
A woman of deep wisdom and compassion, Pearl S. Buck (1892 – 1973) made her humanitarian views clear in both her fiction and nonfiction writings. Following is a selection of feminist quotes by Pearl S. Buck from her nonfiction and novels that were ahead of their time, and are still pertinent today
Pearl S. Buck brought attention to issues of gender, politics, and race, and dared nations and society to help those in need. (photo at right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published in 1930. The Good Earth (1931) her best-known work, was her second novel, and the one that cemented her reputation. It received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1932. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On March 1, 2015 | Updated November 1, 2025 | Comments (0)
Dame Agatha Christie (1890 – 1976) drew on her observations of the world and people surrounding her to become the literary world’s “Queen of Mystery” (sometimes also called “Queen of Crime”). Here we’ll savor 10 quotes by Agatha Christie on writing and the writing life — for anyone who could use a bit of reassurance about the process.
Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), was written as a dare from her sister. This was the book that introduced the now-iconic Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.
Though she earned a place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling novelist in the world with sales of over four billion books, writing didn’t come easily to Dame Agatha. In his post on The Writing Habits of Agatha Christie, Tony Riches explains: Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On January 14, 2015 | Updated August 13, 2025 | Comments (4)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a novelist, poet, and social theorist whose ideas were quite provocative during her heyday as a lecturer, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Sample some of best-known feminist quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, following.
Charlotte resisted the marriage proposal of Charles Stetson, sensing that he wasn’t right for her. As it turned out, she was right.
Within the first year of their 1884 wedding, she gave birth to a daughter and fell into a serious bout of postpartum depression. It didn’t help that the prevailing attitudes that women were frail creatures prone to irrational hysteria. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On December 29, 2014 | Updated June 5, 2024 | Comments (0)
For Anaïs Nin, writing was essential as breathing. This need inspired her multi-volume The Diary of Anaïs Nin series. What started as a voyage of self-discovery eventually transcended the personal into the universal.
Her diaries became a touchstones for a generation of women (and Nin became a feminist icon), not merely one woman’s private quest for identity and meaning.
By the standards of today’s confessional media, Nin’s frank writings may no longer seem as revolutionary as they did just a generation ago. In the final volume of the Diary (Volume Seven, 1966 –1974), she delighted in sharing snippets from the countless letters of gratitude she received from women everywhere, in all walks of life: Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On August 25, 2014 | Updated August 16, 2024 | Comments (2)
Despite (or because of) her brilliance, Virginia Woolf was continually beset with self-doubt when it came to her writing endeavors.
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Manic Depression and the Life of Virginia Woolf, author and psychiatrist Peter Dally discerned a pattern by which Woolf appeared excited yet stable when starting a new book; then, when shaping and revising, her mood gave way to exhaustion and depression.
It’s now widely believed that she suffered from bipolar disorder. There were scant options for treatment at this time, and so, during particularly bad bouts of mania or depression, she withdrew, unable to participate in her active social life, and found it difficult to focus on writing.
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