Wish List for Literary Ladies Guide
By Nava Atlas | On | Comments (8)
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
… and really, anything of interest to you that relates to classic women authors —pitch me!
Atherton, Gertrude
Bogan, Louise
Bowen, Elizabeth
Breithaupt, Marguerite
Burney, Fanny
Carson, Rachel
Chang, Eileen
Clifton, Lucille
Compton-Burnett, Ivy
Crafts, Hannah
Davenport, Marcia
Davis, Rebecca Harding
Delafield, E.M.
Delaney, Clarrisa Scott
Dickens, Monica
Duras, Marguerite
Eberhardt, Isabelle
Edgeworth, Maria
Evans, Augusta Jane
Ferne, Fannie
Field, Rachel (All This and Heaven, Too)
Fitzgerald, Penelope
Fuller, Margaret
Gale, Zona
George, Jean Craighead
Gibbons, Stella (Cold Comfort Farm)
Glasgow, Ellen
Henry, Margerite
Holley, Marietta
Holtby, Winifred (South Riding)
Hopkins, Pauline (Of One Blood)
Howard, Elizabeth Jane
Howe, Julia Ward
Jackson, Helen Hunt
Johnston, Mary
Kerr, Jean
King, Grace
Kingston, Maxine Hong
Kollontai, Alexandra
Konigsberg, E.L.
Kumin, Maxine
Lagerlöf, Selma – claimed
Landon, Margaret (Anna and the King of Siam)
Luce, Claire Boothe
Margolin, Anna
Marshall, Paule
Miller, May
Mitford, Nancy
Moore, Marianne
Mowatt, Anna Cora
Murry, Judith Sargent
Newsome, Effie Lee
O’Brien, Kate
Oliver, Mary
Peterkin, Julia Mood
Pizan, Christine de
Popel, Esther
Porter, Eleanor H. (Pollyanna)
Richmond, Grace S.
Richardson, Dorothy
Rowlandson, Mary
Russ, Joanna
Sachs, Nelly
Sappho
Schreiner, Olive
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria
Sidney, Margaret
Sitwell, Edith
Smith, Lillian
Sontag, Susan
Southworth, E.D.E.N.
Spark, Muriel
Spencer, Anne
Spyri, Johanna (Heidi)
Stoddard, Elizabeth Drew
Struther, Jan (Mrs. Miniver)
Taylor, Elizabeth – claimed
Terhune, Mary Virginia Hawes
Thompson, Flora (Lark Rise to Candleford)
Undset, Sigrid – claimed
Ury, Else
Walker, Margaret (Jubilee)
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
Wylie, Eleanor
Yourcenaur, Marguerite
Related Posts
Twelve Great Literary Ladies, Twelve Valuable Lessons for the Writing Life
The Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life by Nava Atlas
Librivox: Listen to Classic Literature Online
Gems from Classic Women Authors’ Journals
Classic Women Authors on “How Do Writers Get Ideas?”
Is it better to be a modest success than to risk failure?
Could you please consider adding Edna St. Vincent Millay to the list?
Hi Jennifer, The wonderful Edna is already represented on the site: https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-biography/millay-edna-st-vincent/ — there are also a couple of related posts on her poetry. The site is currently being slightly redesigned, and there will be a landing page for browsing biographies that are up on the site soon. Thanks for your interest!
Ellen Gilchrist!?
She sounds quite worthy, Laura, but one of the criteria for being on the Literary Ladies site is they have to have passed on!
Would you consider having Gene Stratton Porter on the list (Girl of the Limberlost, Freckles etc.)
Sure! I’ll add her right now. Might you be interested in tackling a page about her?
Please consider adding Dawn Powell to the list.
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?