Literary Ladies Guide

Katherine Mansfield (1888 – 1923) was a complex, brilliant writer of short stories who lived with tuberculosis for several years that overlapped with her most productive time as a writer. The following selection of gutsy and inspiring quotes by Katherine Mansfield that demonstrate her desire to live life to the fullest, even at its most difficult times.

New Zealand-born Mansfield adopted the bohemian life in London in 1908, and it was then that she began writing short stories.

Her first collection was published in 1911 and reflected a certain disillusionment with her native country. Titled In a German Pension, it received favorable reviews and was praised for “acute insight” and “unquenchable humour.” Read More→

Presented here is a selection of passages from the diaries and journals of several iconic women authors — Louisa May Alcott, L.M. Montgomery, Enid Bagnold, Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, and Sylvia Plath. Also introduced is Anne Lister, AKA “Gentleman Jack,” who is considered a prolific secret diarist moreso than an author.

For many well-known authors, a personal diary or journal was a constant companion and confidant. Into it they poured their dreams, goals and desires, as well as their fears and insecurities.

What’s striking about these entries is that they reveal a great deal of self-doubt. It goes to show that in many cases, confidence is less important to success than perseverance. Confidence as a writer is something gained over time.

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Orchard House, best known as the home in which Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, is a literary site that’s a must-do for devotees of this classic American author. 

Located in Concord, Massachusetts (within an hour of Boston) the house opened its doors to the public in 1911, some twenty-three years after the deaths of Louisa May and her father, the noted philosopher and educator Amos Bronson Alcott.

The interior rooms of Orchard House can be seen via a docent-led tour lasting about an hour. The Alcott family comes to life through the tour guide’s narrative, and questions are cheerfully answered along the way.

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From the 1961 Doubleday edition of No Signposts in the Sea by Vita Sackville-West: In this brilliantly fashioned short novel by Vita Sackville-West, one of the most distinguished of British writers, a famous journalist accompanies an attractive widow on a leisurely voyage and discovers the raptures and torments of an apparently unrequited love.

His passion mounts even as he must face the fact that his beloved is unattainable; for, as the reader gradually learns, it is not just a matter of his humble origins, nor of her reticence and seeming preference for a likable — and highly eligible — fellow passenger. It is that he himself has only a brief time to live. Read More→

Betty Smith followed the blockbuster success of her first novel, the 1943 autobiographical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn with three more novels that drew upon her life experiences growing up and coming of age in immigrant communities. Maggie-Now (1958) was her third novel.

Another story of an Irish immigrant family in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Maggie-Now, her parents, and her husband are central to this story of of making a living and raising a family, with all the joys and challenges along the way.

The description from the 2012 edition’s publisher, Harper Perennial Modern Classics: Read More→

Jessie Willcox Smith (September 6, 1863 – May 3, 1935) was a prolific American illustrator who thrived during what was called the Golden Age of illustration. She was among a handful of respected women illustrators called The Red Rose Girls, who lived and worked together.

Her art embellished more than sixty books and scores of magazine stories and articles from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the books she so beautifully illustrated was the 1915 edition of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Here are a few of them.

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From the 1985 W.W. Norton edition: In May Sarton‘s novel, The Magnificent Spinster, she explores the realities and reverberations of a fifty-year friendship between two remarkable women that ended with the death of Jane Reid.

It is relived because Cam, in her seventies, felt compelled to celebrate “the magnificent spinster” in a novel. The story becomes a complex “double fiction” through which we experience both Cam’s struggles and triumphs and the dominant story of Jane Reid.

Jane was born a Boston Brahmin, grand-daughter of a legendary man of letters. Tall, beautiful, wealthy, she was pursued by men but was the intimate of women. Read More→

The Awakening is a short novel by Kate Chopin, published in 1899. It’s the story of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother who struggles with these roles in the rigid social milieu of late-19th-century New Orleans.

Kate Chopin’s untimely death just a few years after The Awakening‘s publication hastened  the silencing of this exquisite work along with most of the rest of this talented author’s life and work.

The Awakening  was rediscovered and republished in the late 1960s and now holds a secure place as a classic in American literature and a staple of feminist studies.

More about The Awakening on this site:

• Quotes from The Awakening by Kate Chopin
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin: An Analysis
• Willa Cather’s Review of The Awakening (1899)

Following is the text in its entirety. The Awakening is in the public domain.

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