Wish List for Literary Ladies Guide

By Nava Atlas | On | Comments (6)

The goal of Literary Ladies’ Guide is to be the most comprehensive site about classic women authors (mainly in the English language, or who have been translated into English). The authors listed must be deceased, since our mission is to focus on our literary foremothers. Fortunately, there are many more women writing today than there were even in the recent past, and to have entries on living writers would be overwhelming.

To help us complete our goal, if you’d like to write a main entry on any of the authors listed below, please let us know by reaching out via our contact form.

Posts should follow this example format: https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-biography/du-maurier-daphne/ and another good example is: https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-biography/audre-lorde/

Please contact us first, though, to make sure no one else has claimed the author you may be interested in writing about. Submissions should be in the form of a word doc, and we will edit and post on our end. If you have a site or blog, we’d of course be glad to link to it, and include your brief bio.

We’re also looking for posts on feminism and feminist topics as they relate to women’s classic literature and the authors on this site.

Finally, we’re open to other contributions as they pertain to authors already on the site; see the slider at the top of The Literary Ladies’ Guide to the Writing Life  — posts should be more on the side of informative and/or entertaining, though we do welcome literary analyses that are more academic.

Opinion pieces and book reviews are welcome, too, as long as they pertain in some way to classic women authors.

Before you delve into the author wish list following, here’s a short list of topics we’d love to see on the site:

• Great memoirs and autobiographies of classic women writers 
• Influential one-book authors (Margaret Mitchell, Harper Lee, Anna Sewell, etc.)
• Literary friendships: Willa Cather & Sarah Orne Jewett; Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville-West; Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton
• Authors who wrote classics before age 25 (Mary Shelley, Carson McCullers, Miles Franklin, Colette, François Sagan, etc.)
• Under-appreciated literary heroines for girls (Mary of The Secret Garden; Harriet the Spy; Meg Murray of A Wrinkle in Time, Emily of New Moon; etc.)
• Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s excellent marriage
• Jane Austen Fan Fiction
• Literary love affairs and marriages  (as separate posts; then they’d be part of a round-up): Gellhorn and Hemingway; Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West; Anaïs Nin, Henry and June Miller; Katherine Mansfield and John Murray, etc.)
• Dorothy Parker’s Civil Rights activism and how she funded the NAACP
• How Margaret Mitchell secretly funded the education of black medical students
• Classic books that are good for book groups
• Discussion guides for classic novels by women
• Women and depression in literature (The Bell Jar, Yellow Wallpaper, etc.)
• Classic novels by women authors to read aloud with your children
• Classic novels for middle grade readers
• Women who won the Nobel Prize in literature

… and really, anything of interest to you that relates to classic women authors —pitch me!

Atherton, Gertrude

Austin, Mary

Babbitt, Natalie (Tuck Everlasting)

Barnes, Margaret Ayer

Barney, Natalie Clifford

Bishop, Elizabeth

Bogan, Louise

Bowen, Elizabeth

Boyle, Kay

Breithaupt, Marguerite

Brittain, Vera

Burney, Fanny

Carson, Rachel

Carter, Angela

Cleary, Beverly

Compton-Burnett, Ivy

Crafts, Hannah

Davenport, Marcia

Davis, Rebecca Harding

de Burgos, Julia

Delafield, E.M.

Delaney, Clarrisa Scott

Deledda, Grazia

Dickens, Monica

Doolittle, Hilda

Duras, Marguerite

Edgeworth, Maria

Evans, Augusta Jane

Ferne, Fannie

Field, Rachel (All This and Heaven, Too)

Fitzgerald, Penelope

Fuller, Margaret

Gale, Zona

Gibbons, Stella (Cold Comfort Farm)

Glasgow, Ellen

Glaspell, Susan

Henry, Margerite

Holley, Marietta

Hopkins, Pauline (Of One Blood)

Howe, Julia Ward

Jackson, Helen Hunt

Jacobs, Harriet Ann

Johnston, Mary

King, Grace

Kingston, Maxine Hong

Kirkland, Caroline

Kumin, Maxine

Lagerlöf, Selma 

Landon, Margaret (Anna and the King of Siam)

Lazarus, Emma

Le Guin, Ursula

Luce, Claire Boothe

Miller, May

Mitford, Nancy 

Moore, Marianne

Mowatt, Anna Cora

Murdoch, Iris

Murry, Judith Sargent

Nelson, Alice Dunbar

Newsome, Effie Lee 

Norton, Mary (The Borrowers)

O’Brien, Kate

Peterkin, Julia Mood

Pizan, Christine de

Popel, Esther

Porter, Eleanor H. (Pollyanna)

Porter, Gene Stratton 

Powell, Dawn

Rich, Adrienne

Richmond, Grace S.

Richardson, Dorothy

Rowlandson, Mary

Russ, Joanna

Sachs, Nelly

Sappho

Schreiner, Olive

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria

Shange, Ntozake

Sidney, Margaret

Sitwell, Edith

Smith, Lillian

Sontag, Susan

Southworth, E.D.E.N.

Spark, Muriel

Spencer, Anne

Spyri, Johanna (Heidi)

Struther, Jan (Mrs. Miniver)

Terhune, Mary Virginia Hawes

Thompson, Flora (Lark Rise to Candleford)

Undset, Sigrid

Warner, Sylvia Townsend

Warner, Gertrude Chandler (Boxcar Children)

Warren, Mercy Otis

Webster, Jean (Daddy Long Legs)

Weldy, Ann

Whipple, Dorothy

White, Antonia

Williams, Margery (Velveteen Rabbit)

Wilson, Harriet

Wittig, Monique

Wollstonecraft, Mary

Wylie, Eleanor

Yourcenaur, Marguerite

Categories: Literary Musings

6 Responses to “Wish List for Literary Ladies Guide”

1. Ellen Gilchrist!?

   Reply

   • She sounds quite worthy, Laura, but one of the criteria for being on the Literary Ladies site is they have to have passed on!

     Reply

2. Would you consider having Gene Stratton Porter on the list (Girl of the Limberlost, Freckles etc.)

   Reply

   • Sure! I’ll add her right now. Might you be interested in tackling a page about her?

     Reply

3. Please consider adding Dawn Powell to the list.

   Reply

   • Oh yes, how could I have forgotten; I even have one of her books. I will add her now. Might you be interested in writing the entry?

     Reply