Literary Ladies Guide

Louise de la Ramée, (known by her pen name of Ouida; January 1, 1839 – January 25, 1908) was an English novelist of French extraction. Born in Bury St. Edmunds, England, her nom de plume was supposedly suggested by a young sister’s efforts to pronounce “Louise.”

The best-known of her many works are A Dog of Flanders, a children’s book that has been adapted to film numerous times, and Under the Flag. She wrote more than forty novels, plus many short stories and children’s books. She also contributed numerous articles and essays to magazines and journals.

Her novels dealt with all phases of European society, some of her themes being treated with cleverness and skill, often with cynical railing at the weaknesses of her characters. Read More→

The Lifted Veil by George Eliot is a novella by the esteemed British author best known for weighty books like Middlemarch. She interrupted her work on The Mill on the Floss to work on it. Following is the full text.

The Lifted Veil first appeared in Blackwood Magazine in 1859, the same year that her highly regarded novel Adam Bede was published. It wasn’t published in book format until 1878 as part of a single volume with Silas Marner and Brother Jacob. The Lifted Veil wasn’t published as a stand-alone volume until 1924, more than forty years after the author’s death.

Latimer, the book’s unreliable narrator, is a sensitive intellectual who believes that he can see into the future and read the thoughts of others. These clairvoyant powers, in his mind, are a curse.  Read More→

Lore Segal (March 8, 1928 – October 7, 2024) chronicled her experiences as a Holocaust survivor and an immigrant in search of a home who eventually found her way to the United States. Her fiction was oddly humorous and yet deeply insightful.

Poet Carolyn Kizer, writing about Segal’s 1985 novel Her First American in the New York Times Book Review, said Segal came “closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel,” even though, Kizer noted with a touch of irony, its main characters were Black people and Jewish refugees and it was not written by a man. Read More→

Effie Lee Newsome (1885–1979), was a writer, illustrator, and librarian whose poetry for adults and children made her a notable literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

From the time her poetry was first published in NAACP’s The Crisis, her work was regularly featured in anthologies and other publications, particularly in the 1920s. 

Mary Effie Lee was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in Wilberforce, Ohio. Her parents were Mary Elizabeth Ashe Lee and Benjamin Franklin Lee. Her clergyman father was editor-in-chief of the Christian Recorder and served as president of Wilberforce University. Read More→

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880 – 1966) was a respected poet and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement. Following is the full text of her first published collection, The Heart of a Woman  and Other Poems (1918).

The Heart of a Woman  was followed by Bronze (1922) and An Autumn Love Cycle (1928). Many years later she came out with Share My World (1962). With four published collections, it’s quite likely that Georgia was the most widely published of the female poets of her era.

Georgia’s poems were published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, particularly in the 1920s. In her poetry, Georgia addressed issues of race as well as universal themes of love, motherhood, and being a woman in a male-dominated world.  Read More→

For those of us who love (or make that obsessed with) books, novels about books, bookstores, and libraries are the icing on the cake. Reading about books and bookish people in fictional narratives, might seem odd, but for the devout bibliophile, it makes perfect sense.

Presented here is a selection of contemporary novels whose stories are centered around bookstores or libraries. What could be cozier reading on a chilly day accompanied by a warm drink, a blanket, and a four-legged friend or two? Read More→

“You survived. That’s important.”
“But who am I? An insignificant girl with no great talent. Why was I the one to be saved?”
  He smiled a little. “Haven’t you heard that God heeds each sparrow’s fall?”
  So many sparrows fell. Was God watching? Did He count them? Why was I chosen to live?”
 (from A Chosen Sparrow by Vera Caspary, 1964)

This in-depth look at A Chosen Sparrow by Vera Caspary is excerpted from A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth ©2022. Reprinted by permission. Read More→

It’s never too soon to introduce young readers to classic authors. Angelica Shirley Carpenter’s The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett, a picture book biography (Bushel & Peck Books, 2024) does so in an immensely engaging way.

Vivid illustrations by Helena Pérez García that burst with colorful expression on every page. Angelica presents the story of Frances Hodgson’s insecure childhood on both sides of the Atlantic, and her challenges and triumphs as a writer.

Marrying Dr. Swan Burnett, having two sons, experiencing triumph as well as hardships and tragedies and writing through it all is part of the fascinating story of this author’s life. Frances’s story is one of perseverance, finding moments of joy in complicated circumstances, and the solace of creative pursuit. Read More→