Literary Ladies Guide

Silvina Ocampo (July 28, 1903 – December 14, 1993) spent most of her life in Buenos Aires, the cosmopolitan capital of Argentina. Born into wealth and privilege, she developed a unique body of work inspired by the avant-garde art and literary movements of her time, including Surrealism and Magical Realism.

Too often, Silvina Ocampo has been mentioned only in relation to her sister, Victoria Ocampo—an intellectual, activist, and publisher; and her husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares, a successful writer and frequent collaborator with Jorge Luis Borges (the pioneering short story writer and translator who brought Spanish-language literature to global prominence).

Ocampo’s work is has been been translated into English more frequently of late. Her short stories reveal astonishing originality, gifts for humor and vivid descriptions, and subtle commentary on social issues of her time. Read More→

Marie Colvin (January 12, 1956 – February 22, 2012) was an American journalist known for her intimate, storytelling reporting style covering conflicts worldwide.

She was best known for her coverage of the Middle East (as well as for her trademark black eyepatch, worn after losing her left eye in Sri Lanka). She died while covering the conflict in Syria in 2012, and the Syrian government has since been held responsible for her death. Read More→

Some years before her death, renowned poet, professor, and activist Nikki Giovanni wrote, “I hope I die warmed by the life I tried to live.”

Giovanni’s hope and vision have been realized. When she passed away on December 9, 2024, she was surrounded by the boundless love of her wife, Virginia Fowler, her son Thomas, and her granddaughter Kai.

Nikki Giovanni was eighty-one years old when she died of complications from cancer, her third diagnosis of the disease. Despite this tremendous physical challenge, Ms. Giovanni continued to write, speak, teach, and publish throughout the last decade of her life. Read More→

The work of feminist writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–1797) has endured, despite attempts of critics of her time to bury her legacy after her death. A year after she died, her husband, William Godwin, published Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, unwittingly turning the public against the love of his life.

Two generations later, however, women rediscovered Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing — breathing new life into a historical figure who might have been forgotten along with other notable women whose words were lost to the patriarchy.   

William Godwin meant no harm when he published his memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1798. Mired in grief, he wanted the world to know Mary the way he did— as a compassionate, brilliant woman. Read More→

Zelda Fitzgerald was an American author, artist, and socialite. Although she is best remembered as the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she was a talented writer and artist in her own right, which caused the couple a great deal of conflict.

Zelda wrote one novel (Save Me the Waltz) and an unstaged play, Scandalabra. What is less known is that she wrote various articles for periodicals, including College Humor, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New York Tribune. Here, we’ll take a closer look at five of these little-known features. Read More→

It’s incredible (and sad) that we’re still grappling with the same issues presented in these five 1920s novels by women writers. Four of them fell out of print and were rediscovered and reissued decades later; one has never gone out of print. It’s wonderful that all are available in fresh new or recent editions.

In these reissues, fascinating new introductions, forewords, or afterwords re-introduce these writers aren’t known enough and/or shouldn’t have been forgotten in the first place: Ursula Parrott, Radclyffe Hall, Anzia Yezierska, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

As Edna St. Vincent Millay famously wrote, it’s not one damn thing after another, it’s the same damn thing, over and over. One hundred years or so after these books came out, we’re still grappling with their central themes in the culture and in personal lives. And while that’s frustrating, it’s also why these novels are still relevant to contemporary readers. Read More→

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) was one of the great romantic poets of the Victorian era. “Sonnet 43” breathed her famous words to life: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

Her early texts, flavored with feminism, paved the way for others to follow. Immensely popular in her lifetime, her work was somewhat forgotten until rediscovered with new appreciation starting in the second-wave feminist era of the 1970s. Her life was one of contrasts: she was remarkably prolific, enjoyed a happy marriage with fellow poet Robert Browning, yet her lifelong chronic illness shadowed her for all time.

Browning kept a diary of her ailments, yet many questions remain unanswered about the source of her maladies. A Penn State anthropologist may have found the answer more than a century later. Read More→

Djuna Barnes was a Modernist writer whose various talents and eccentricities made her unique. She went to great lengths to protect her privacy, so it’s not surprising that she had a whole closet full of skeletons. These fascinating facts about Djuna Barnes are presented by Jon Macy, creator of the graphic novel Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes. 

Childhood trauma armored Djuna with a razor sharp wit, and an almost Ahab-and-the-whale, determination to succeed as a writer. Immensely talented, she was a journalist, poet, artist and novelist.

She became a celebrated star in 1920s Paris along with her friends James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Her masterpiece, Nightwood, is one of the greatest lesbian novels ever written, and her influence on modern writers reverberates into the present. Read More→