By Francis Booth | On March 7, 2021 | Updated May 1, 2025 | Comments (4)
In late 1931, the author and diarist Anaïs Nin met Henry Miller and his wife, June. She first fell in love with his writing, and then with the man himself before being seduced by his wife, June.
This excerpt from Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde by Francis Booth recounts what would be a fateful, formative affair:
Henry Miller was the author of banned, erotic novels like Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring, originally published by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press in 1934 and 1936 respectively. Read More→
By Tyler Scott | On February 19, 2021 | Updated July 11, 2024 | Comments (3)
This heartwarming essay by Tyler Scott is an homage to Colette (1873 – 1954), the bold and fearless French author, and discusses how she continues to inspire writers at any stage of practice:
In the fraught year of 2020, I had been too addled and worried to write very much. After a career as a freelancer, I started to wonder if things had ground to a halt. Was this the end of the line for me? After all that work? All that research? All those accolades?
As Claudia Emerson, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and onetime classmate told me, “Sometimes it’s just easier to quit.” Read More→
By Francis Booth | On February 15, 2021 | Updated March 18, 2021 | Comments (0)
Aphra Behn (1640 – 1689), was far ahead of her time as the first Englishwoman to earn a living by the pen as a playwright, poet, and novelist. She was also considered scandalous not just for thriving in a profession generally closed to women, but for the sexually explicit nature of her writing.
This aspect of her artistry is explored in this excerpt from Killing the Angel: Early British Transgressive Women Writers ©2021 by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission:
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf espoused Aphra Behn’s cause as the great precursor of free women writers — though the first book in English was written by Julian of Norwich, the first autobiography was written by Margery Kempe, the first playwright and female poet since antiquity was Hrotsvitha and the first professional woman writer was probably Christine of Pizan. Read More→
By Francis Booth | On February 10, 2021 | Updated November 28, 2023 | Comments (0)
Is it possible that early female authors actually warned their target audience —female readers —against the practice of reading novels? It’s not only possible, but seemed to be a fairly common occurrence. Excerpted from Killing the Angel: Early British Transgressive Women Writers ©2021 by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission.
When Madame Bovary first commits adultery, Flaubert tells us that it was her early reading of novels that was to blame: “she recalled the heroines of the books that she had read, and the lyric legion of these adulterous women began to sing in her memory with the voice of sisters that charmed her.”
In his A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education of 1797, Erasmus Darwin warns that ‘many objectionable passages’ are to be found in novels and Rousseau said ‘no chaste girls ever read a novel.’ But even groundbreaking literary ladies who wrote novels themselves were in two minds about letting their daughters, granddaughters and nieces read them. Here’s a sampling:
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By Jess Mendes | On February 5, 2021 | Updated January 12, 2026 | Comments (0)
Emily Dickinson’s herbarium serves as a time capsule into the poet’s mysterious life. It reflects her poetic connection to nature, and her sensitivity to life and mortality, echoing the enigmatic nature of the poet herself.
Emily lived a quiet life in her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born in 1830. She was a gardener before she was a poet, having studied botany beginning at the age of nine. She also enjoyed working alongside her mother in the garden.
Collecting and pressing flowers was a common hobby for young girls of her time. Emily began her assemblage of flowers while attending Amherst Academy in 1844, and took her passion to new levels, often including pressed flowers in letters she sent. Read More→
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