Literary Ladies Guide

Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott is a collection of four novellas that reveal another side of the author best known for Little Women.

Louisa May Alcott started her writing career with “blood and thunder” tales that evidently, she rather enjoyed producing, even as they helped her make the money she so needed to earn as a way to support her family.

Each of these stories features sharp-witted, outspoken women. Alcott manages to give each tale a twist, and imbues them with suspense and irony. Four stories are included in this edition, although Alcott wrote several more Gothic tales.

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Following is an excerpt from the preface of The Delta of Venus  by Anaïs Nin, in which she discusses why she wrote this 1976 collection of erotica, mainly aimed at a female audience:

 “At the time (1941) we were all writing erotica at a dollar a page, I realized that for centuries we had only one model for this literary genre — the writing of man. I was already conscious of a difference between the masculine and feminine treatment of sexual experience.

I know that there was a great disparity between Henry Miller’s explicitness and my ambiguities — between his humorous, Rabelasian view of sex and my poetic descriptions of sexual relationships in the unpublished portions of the Diary. Read More→

Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) was Willa Cather’s last novel. It was the only book the Virginia-born author set in her home state. It was generally not as well-received as many of her other works, and today, is not as widely known or studied.

An actual incident from Cather’s family history provided the seed of the story, which concerns the troubled marriage of Henry and Sapphira Colbert, who own and operate a small farm and mill near Winchester, Virginia, before the years of the Civil War.

Sapphira, an unhappy and ill middle-aged woman, suspects that her husband is intimately involved with Nancy, a pretty young mixed-race enslaved female of the household. Read More→

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) might have lived the ideal writing life were it not for her lifelong struggle with mental illness. But this wasn’t the only source of anguish.

Surrounded by brilliant intellectuals in the Bloomsbury circle, she was also nurtured and protected by her husband, Leonard Woolf.

Yet she was relentlessly self-critical, restless, and rarely satisfied with her literary efforts. Perhaps that was what drove her to greatness, on the other hand. Read More→

The following 1940 interview with Pearl S. Buck is excerpted from Writers and Writing by Robert van Gelder, 1946: Pearl Buck says that in American life she has found a limitless reservoir of material for writing.

She never “became Chinese,” she always knew that she was American, yet her discovery of this country has had a certain Columbian freshness. (Photo at right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The Good Earth was, in a way, “a pot-boiler,” written on “borrowed money and it had to be written at the time it was because I needed oh, a lot of money. Not just needed it. Had to have it.” Read More→

Excerpted from Writers and Writing by Robert van Gelder, 1946, an interview conducted with Porter in 1940: Katherine Anne Porter stated with evident surprise that her papers are now in order and in her own house.

Formerly she traveled a great deal with a suitcase for personal effects and a steamer trunk filled with manuscripts and notes. “Always I was up to my chin in paper.”

Now she has burned numerous short stories and four novels that she decided not to publish. But the material that she kept to work over is enough to occupy her well into her eighties. There are notes for novels, for a biography of Cotton Mather, and for some forty short stories.

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James Edward Austen-Leigh (1798 – 1874), a nephew of Jane Austen’s, first published A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869. Its second edition in 1871 was much expanded to include more letters and biographical material. 

At this point in time, Jane Austen’s reputation was  waning somewhat, and this publication is credited for having helped to revive her reputation.

In the narrative, Austen-Leigh describes the difficulties experienced by Austen’s family to secure publication for her early works. Indeed, during Jane’s lifetime, her successes were solid yet modest, and much of her work was published under the generic nom de plume “A Lady.” Read More→

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 – 1935) was a woman ahead of her time. From these brief quotes on her feminist ideals, we can see that on the whole, the status of women hasn’t progressed nearly enough.

As an unconventional mother and as a divorced wife, Charlotte experienced a great deal of bias. She began to think about the social forces that oppressed women — even relatively privileged women.

Shedding a light on the economic and social discrimination that forced women into second-class citizenship was the mission of her 1898 book, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Revolution. Read More→