By Nava Atlas | On August 4, 2017 | Updated November 14, 2022 | Comments (0)
This autobiographical Sketch of Childhood by Louisa May Alcott (1832 – 1888) is filled with memories and observations by the beloved American author.
Best known as the author of Little Women and its sequels (including Jo’s Boys and Little Men), the scope of her work went beyond domestic tales into essays, poems, and pseudonymous thrillers.
It was first printed in Louisa May Alcott: Life, Letters, and Journals, compiled and edited by Ednah D. Cheney (1899). Here are Louisa May Alcott’s first-person recollections of her early life: Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On August 3, 2017 | Updated June 28, 2025 | Comments (0)
Willa Cather’s love/hate relationship with fame and the press was fierce. She courted fame in her youth, but expressed discomfort with it once it arrived.
Yet Cather left a wealth of public pronouncements, derived mainly from interviews she granted and speeches she made. She also wrote many autobiographical sketches, press releases, and even furtive semi-reviews in the third person as a way to promote her work.
Still, the more known she became, the more irritable she grew with loss of privacy.
For someone as ambivalent about publicity as Cather claimed to be, she granted tons of interviews. Judging by the vigor of her responses, she seemed to relish holding forth on the subject dearest to her heart—her writings. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On July 31, 2017 | Updated July 13, 2025 | Comments (0)
The biggest myth about Jane Austen’s writing life that she was ashamed of her work and hid her manuscripts as she worked on them. This is patently untrue, which we’ll see in the evidence to the contrary.
Can we ever have enough of Jane Austen? From the search for the modern Mr. Darcy (think Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary) to the appropriation of her iconic narratives (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters) to fan-fiction sequels (Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife), to using the books themselves as a device for telling a contemporary story (The Jane Austen Book Club), there seems to be no such thing as Too Much Jane.
Although it must be said, other than Bridget Jones’s Diary, these other titles were fairly slammed by readers. And that’s just considering books — counting all the film and TV adaptations of her novels is a topic in and of itself. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On July 24, 2017 | Updated August 1, 2026 | Comments (5)
From her sunny characters, notably Anne Shirley (of Anne of Green Gables) and happy plots, you’d think that L.M. Montgomery (1874 – 1942) was reflecting on an idyllic life. But writing was something that served as a pleasurable escape, especially as she grew older.
Montgomery, known to her familiars as Maud, wove her personal experiences with marriage and motherhood into her work. She struggled with severe bouts of depression, and was the primary caregiver to her husband, whose mental illnesses eventually incapacitated him. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On July 12, 2017 | Updated October 26, 2022 | Comments (0)
Prolific American poet Amy Lowell (1874 – 1925) was above all considered an Imagist, which in her definition was the “concentration is of the very essence of poetry” whose aim is to produce verses “that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.” Here are presented in her words, thoughts on her vers libre (free verse) poetry.
Lowell was kind of an evangelist of poetry, powered by her incredibly energy. She lectured tirelessly to promote poetry, and wrote ceaselessly — in addition to more than 650 poems, she wrote numerous essays, as well as works of criticism and translation. T.S. Eliot called her “the demon saleswoman of poetry.”
Here to shed more light on her work is the poet herself, from the Preface of Men, Women and Ghosts (1919): Read More→
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