By Taylor Jasmine | On February 28, 2025 | Updated March 28, 2025 | Comments (0)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) was one of the great romantic poets of the Victorian era. “Sonnet 43” breathed her famous words to life: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
Her early texts, flavored with feminism, paved the way for others to follow. Immensely popular in her lifetime, her work was somewhat forgotten until rediscovered with new appreciation starting in the second-wave feminist era of the 1970s. Her life was one of contrasts: she was remarkably prolific, enjoyed a happy marriage with fellow poet Robert Browning, yet her lifelong chronic illness shadowed her for all time.
Browning kept a diary of her ailments, yet many questions remain unanswered about the source of her maladies. A Penn State anthropologist may have found the answer more than a century later. Read More→
By Jon Macy | On February 22, 2025 | Comments (0)
Djuna Barnes was a Modernist writer whose various talents and eccentricities made her unique. She went to great lengths to protect her privacy, so it’s not surprising that she had a whole closet full of skeletons. These fascinating facts about Djuna Barnes are presented by Jon Macy, creator of the graphic novel Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes.
Childhood trauma armored Djuna with a razor sharp wit, and an almost Ahab-and-the-whale, determination to succeed as a writer. Immensely talented, she was a journalist, poet, artist and novelist.
She became a celebrated star in 1920s Paris along with her friends James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Her masterpiece, Nightwood, is one of the greatest lesbian novels ever written, and her influence on modern writers reverberates into the present. Read More→
By Marsha Gordon | On February 11, 2025 | Comments (0)
Once the most renowned ex-wife in America, bestselling author Ursula Parrott (1899 – 1957) was routinely described as “famous” in her lifetime when the press covered her new books, Hollywood deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law.
As I detail in Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, she published twenty books from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, several of them bestsellers, and over one hundred short stories, articles, and novel-length magazine serials.
Ursula Parrott piloted for the Civilian Air Corps during World War II; co-founded a weekly rural Connecticut newspaper with a group including American Newspaper Guild founder Heywood Broun and her literary agent George Bye; was an informant in a federal drug investigation; and travelled the world, including an extended story-collecting trip to Russia in the 1930s. And between all her writing and other adventures, she married (and divorced) four times. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On February 6, 2025 | Updated May 16, 2025 | Comments (1)
Women from all walks of life have turned to authorship as a medium for self-expression and social impact. They address universal issues from defining one’s identity as a woman in the world to finding the resilience to handle life’s trials and tribulations.
The literary world wasn’t always welcoming to female writers. Some wrote under pseudonyms so that their gender wouldn’t have an effect on the reception of their work. Women writers were often sidelined from prestigious awards, with the result that brilliant works weren’t considered worthy of recognition.
Authors like Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf were among those who slowly changed the face of the male-dominated publishing industry. Austen’s on-point social observations have delighted readers for generations, while Woolf’s classic feminist writings have remained relevant. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On January 31, 2025 | Updated August 1, 2025 | Comments (0)
To write a great novel (or even a decent one), it seems that a writer should have a certain amount of life experience. But that’s not always the case — not in the past, and not in the present. Following are seven novels written when their authors were precocious young women — some still in their teens.
Some have become iconic classics; others sold in the millions are forgotten bestsellers.
So, what of it? Maybe the point is that if you have a story inside of you, find a way to tell it no matter what your age — tender through advanced. It may not become a classic or a bestseller or even be published, but at least will be something to build on. Read More→
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