By Nava Atlas | On April 10, 2015 | Updated May 25, 2022 | Comments (0)
Like many authors battered by continual rejection of a manuscript, L.M. Montgomery gave up and placed the worn Anne of Green Gables manuscript in a hatbox and gave up. After it languished in a freezing attic for nearly a year, Maud, as she was known to her familiars, decided to give it one more shot, sending it to Boston publisher L.C. Page.
Serendipitously, there she had an ally—a Prince Edward Island expatriate named Miss Arbuckle. One of the company’s readers, she was enchanted with the novel’s romanticized Island setting.
Miss Arbuckle “quietly and persistently championed Anne to the other staff readers until several supported the novel,” according to Maria Rubio in Writing a Life: L.M. Montgomery.
Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 1, 2015 | Updated September 30, 2025 | Comments (10)
Just like the rest of us, famed writers loved their furry companions, amply illustrated by this roundup of classic women authors and their dogs.
Dogs, cats, and other companion animals (bunnies, domesticated birds, etc.) bring comfort and joy in good times and bad and can be good company whether the writing is flowing or comes with difficulty. At right, the young Beatrix Potter with her four-legged friend.
The unwavering love and devotion of dogs are much welcomed in a profession that can sometimes be lonely.
Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 1, 2015 | Updated February 18, 2025 | Comments (0)
Radclyffe Hall (1880 – 1943) was a British author best known for her groundbreaking novel, The Well of Loneliness. It’s often described as the story of young woman’s coming to terms with her lesbian identity, but it’s more than that.
It’s also about a person born with a female body making sense of her maleness. It was certainly ahead of its time in expressing the concept of gender dysphoria without the vocabulary available today. Radclyffe Hall, in real life, wore male clothing, preferred to be called “John,” and wanted to be accepted by society as male.
Radclyffe Hall described herself as a “congenital invert,” a term that came from early 20th-century sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing and refers to a type of inborn gender reversal where women could be born with a masculine soul and vice versa — in contemporary terms, what is referred to as transgender. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On March 29, 2015 | Updated June 6, 2021 | Comments (0)
Librivox is a free resource for audio versions of classic literature that you can download onto your devices or simply listen to from your browser. These audio readings of public domain literature are read by volunteers, so they’re more variable than the kinds of audiobooks read by professional actors.
Librivox offers audio versions of many classic books that are otherwise unavailable. You can search by author or title; while of course, there are many classics by male authors available, for the purposed of this site, we’re here to promote classics by women.
Here’s a list of literary ladies whose novels, short fiction, and poetry have been recorded for Librivox.org. Not all the authors’ bibliographies are complete, so if you notice a public domain work that’s not there, perhaps you can volunteer to create an audio version!
Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On March 19, 2015 | Updated November 8, 2026 | Comments (0)
Adapted from the original article in The Emporia Gazette – November 10, 1938: The 1938 Nobel Prize in literature today was awarded to Pearl S. Buck, American author of The Good Earth and other novels dealing with China.
She was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia in 1893 and has spent much of her life in China. (photo at right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Parents Missionaries – Mrs. Buck’s parents were missionaries in China and her first husband, J. Lossing Buck, was a member of the faculty of Nanking university. They were divorced in 1935. Read More→
Categories: 
Comments: