By Nava Atlas | On May 1, 2022 | Updated August 4, 2023 | Comments (4)
Jo March, the standout sister of Little Women (1868), was the idealized alter ego of her creator, Louisa May Alcott — both were tomboyish, with a bit of a temper. Like Louisa, Jo was completely dedicated to the pursuit of writing and the writer’s life. Or was she? Certainly, that was her stated ambition in Little Women, in which we witness the birth of her first book.
I can’t think of another fictional character who inspired generations of real-life aspiring female writers. It’s almost easier to find writers who weren’t at least a little influenced by Jo, than those who were. Because so, so many young wordsmiths wanted to grown up to be like Jo.
Though Jo longed to be a writer more than anything, she also sought a happy medium between achieving independence and finding love, something that was expected of women of her time. That’s why she felt she had to turn down Laurie’s proposal (much to the chagrin of millions of readers). Read More→
By Tyler Scott | On April 29, 2022 | Updated July 11, 2024 | Comments (0)
Claudia Emerson (1957 – 2014) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Late Wife in 2006. I think she would have been eventually chosen as the United States Poet Laureate if her brilliant career hadn’t been cut short by cancer.
She not only published eight collections of verse, but she was also a gifted teacher and musician. I knew her because we were in the same class at Chatham Hall, an all-girls’ school in Pittsylvania, County, southside Virginia. We were the class of 1975.
Chatham Hall was founded in 1894, originally named Chatham Episcopal Institute, and our most famous graduate was Georgia O’Keeffe. The school’s motto is Esto perpetua – “Let it be perpetual.” Read More→
Jane Austen by Sarah Fanny Malden (1889) offers an excellent 19th-century view of Jane Austen’s works, along with a handful of chapters on the life of this beloved British author. This excerpt, featuring one such chapter, offers glimpses of Jane Austen’s childhood and what she engaged with as a young woman.
Born in Steventon, Hampshire (England), Jane (1775 – 1817) was part of a convivial middle-class family consisting of five brothers and her sister Cassandra, with whom she was very close. Her father was an esteemed rector. Jane spent the first twenty-five years of her life in Steventon, after which the family moved to Bath.
Mrs. Malden said of her sources, “The writer wishes to express her obligations to Lord Brabourne and Mr. C. Austen Leigh for their kind permission to make use of the Memoir and Letters of their gifted relative, which have been her principal authorities for this work.” Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On April 10, 2022 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Simone de Beauvoir first met the French author Violette Leduc in 1945. At the time, de Beauvoir and her partner Jean-Paul Sartre were the golden couple of Parisian intellectual circles, while Violette Leduc was a struggling writer mired in poverty.
Their first meeting, in the heady atmosphere of the Café Flore on the Left Bank, came only after Leduc had observed de Beauvoir and Sartre from a distance for several months, gathering the courage to introduce herself.
The resulting friendship seemed unlikely. Yet it lasted for several years, with mutual respect and admiration that survived Leduc’s unrequited attraction to de Beauvoir as well as the differing circumstances of the two women and their wildly diverging experiences of success. Read More→
By Sarah Fanny Malden | On March 28, 2022 | Updated April 4, 2022 | Comments (0)
Jane Austen’s love life has long been the subject of conjecture. Her purported romance with Thomas Lefroy, a young Irishman, for example, was the subject of the 2003 book Becoming Jane Austen, which was adapted to the middling 2007 film, Becoming Jane.
Sincere attempts have been made to sort fact from fiction when it comes to Jane Austen’s romances, and this excerpt from Jane Austen by Sarah Fanny Malden (1889) is an excellent endeavor.
This book is focused more on Austen’s work than on her life, with the exception of a handful of chapters, this being one of them. The publication was part of an Eminent Women series published by W.H. Allen & Co., London. Read More→
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