By Taylor Jasmine | On March 29, 2017 | Updated July 27, 2026 | Comments (0)
The following passage from A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf reminds us that each woman who writes is both an inheritor and an originator.
In it, she asks women who write to produce all kinds of books — and why stop at books? Let’s include all sorts of written output, fiction and nonfiction; articles, essays, blog posts, verse, and many etceteras for our own good and that of the world at large.
Let’s pay homage to her and other women writers who have paved the way by doing just that — elevating the voices of women in literature and in discourse in general. Read More→
By Emma Ward | On March 18, 2017 | Updated August 21, 2022 | Comments (0)
Zora Neale Hurston, the American novelist, memoirist, and folklorist was an active member of the Harlem Renaissance, an era of flourishing art and literature created by the Black community in New York City.
Fannie Hurst, her contemporary, was an author who supported social equality causes, and became sought after for her short stories.
Hurst was incredibly successful as a novelist and story writer in the 1920s and 1930s, becoming one of the era’s top-earning authors. Through a strange twist of fate that Zora, who was virtually forgotten when she died in 1960, is now a revered, widely read, and studied American author while today Hurst is rarely read and little known.
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By Tony Riches | On March 13, 2017 | Updated August 22, 2026 | Comments (4)
What is known of the writing habits of Jane Austen, the beloved author, is simple and fascinating. Reprinted by permission from The Writing Desk; contributed by Tony Riches.
Most of Jane Austen’s best known writing was done at Chawton Cottage in Hampshire, where she revised Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey. It was there that she wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.
Jane would try to write every day, close to a window for the light, using an amazingly small walnut table (which survives at the Chawton Cottage Museum) and a ‘writing box’ thought to have been a gift from her father. Read More→
By Emma Ward | On March 12, 2017 | Updated October 6, 2026 | Comments (2)
Zora Neale Hurston was an American novelist, memoirist, and folklorist. In I Love Myself When I Am Laughing and Then Again When I Am Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, the chapter titled “What White Publishers Won’t Print” discusses the lack of average black people appearing in literature and film.
Though the essay was originally published in Negro Digest in April, 1950; pages 85-89, the above mentioned anthology is more accessible.
In it she wrote about the importance of accurate portrayal of society’s marginalized groups.
In some ways this was ironic, because some Black writers like Richard Wright criticized her for applying the “minstrel technique” to her characters and penned a scathing review of what is arguably Hurston’s best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God.(Link to the October 5, 1937 issue of The New Masses; see Wright’s review, “Between Laughter and Tears,” on page 22.)
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By Emma Ward | On February 12, 2017 | Updated April 27, 2024 | Comments (0)
Jessie Redmon Fauset is remembered as one of the literary “midwives of the Harlem Renaissance,” an influential circle that ushered in a new generation of creative voices in the black arts movement. She was also a poet and novelist in her own right.
Fauset started her career after reading T.S. Stribling’s novel Birthright (1922). This novel about black life written by a white man introduced fallacies to the public, and influenced Fauset among others to write about their experiences as people of color for a more accurate account.
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