Literary Ladies Guide

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→

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) was the third published book and second novel by Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960), the noted author and ethnographer. It’s arguably her best known work and something of a feminist classic.

Zora had a dual career as a writer (producing novels, short stories, plays, and essays) and as an anthropologist. With her determined intelligence and humor, she became a big name in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s.

Janie, the story’s heroine, searches for independence, identity, love, and happiness over the course of twenty-five years and several relationships. This story is actually not unlike Zora’s own, though it could be argued that she never found true happiness. Read More→

Dear Literary Ladies,
Sometimes I feel that I don’t have enough life experience to be a good writer. Everything I write, in hindsight, looks rather shallow and inauthentic. Should I wait until I’ve lived more fully, and gain some wisdom, before I bare my soul to the public in writing, or should I just plow ahead?

I wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in Haiti. It was dammed up in me, and I wrote it in seven weeks. I wish I could write it again. In fact, I regret all of my books. It is one of the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to possess in the beginning. Read More→

Excerpted from review of The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Connor in The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Missouri), March, 1960: Flannery O’Connor, a comparatively young Southern woman, writes with such skill and control that to praise her novel to excess would come easily and willingly.

Suffice it to say that The Violent Bear It Away is the best of her three books and that a comparison between this neo-Gothic tale and the novels written by William Faulkner at the height of his literary powers, could in no way harm Miss O’Connor. Read More→

Dear Literary Ladies,
I’m plugging away at a modest but steady writing career, but sometimes I think about aiming higher. I admit that I’m afraid to fail— and then look foolish to myself and others. What about you? Do you think it’s better to stick with what you do best, rather than stick your neck out and possibly fail?

Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.

—Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf, August, 1928

Over the recent years, writers have increasingly turned to self-publishing. The reasons vary:  It’s a route to consider if finding a publisher or agent has proven impossible; one has a niche audience that’s easily reachable; or there’s a specific reason to want complete control over the process. Here’s a bit of surprising self-publishing history by some classic authors.

Gone are the days of having to store copious numbers of cartons of unsold books in the garage or under the bed. User-friendly print-on-demand or e-book services allow writers to create books on an as-needed basis, avoiding the pitfalls of overprinting.

Whether the product ends up only in the hands of the author’s mom and cousins or becomes one of the rare successes that sells like wildfire, it’s good to have options. Read More→

Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007) conducted a writing life that can best be described as one of perseverance. Best known for her award-winning young adult science fiction, particularly A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle offered much wisdom on writing and the writing life in her memoirs.

L’Engle often wrote of the struggles of what the called the triad of “mother-wife-writer.”

When she was writing, she felt guilty that she wasn’t doing enough for her children, and when she was mothering, she felt awful that she wasn’t writing. It was typical angst of midcentury mothers, who took on the lion’s share of childrearing. Read More→

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.

Read More→