Literary Women

Books about women who have shaped our literary landscape.
Updated September 19, 2022
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The unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962
Plath, Sylvia.
Paper Book
The complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath--essential reading for anyone who has been moved and fascinated by the poet's life and work. "A genuine literary event.... Plath's journals contain marvels of discovery." --The New York Times Book Review  ...
Agatha Christie: An Autobiograph
Agatha Christie
Paper Book
Savage beauty : the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Milford, Nancy.
Paper Book
Thirty years after the smashing success ofZelda, Nancy Milford returns with a stunning second act.Savage Beautyis the portrait of a passionate, fearless woman who obsessed American ever as she tormented herself. If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as...
Jane Austen: A Life
Claire Tomalin
Paper Book
Here, firmly rooted in her own social setting for the first time, is the real Jane Austen--the shy woman willing to challenge convention, the woman of no pretensions who nevertheless called herself "formidable," a woman who could be frivolous and yet suffer from black depressions, who showed...
Blue nights
Didion, Joan.
Paper Book
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana...
A writer's diary
Woolf, Virginia.
Digital file
From 1918 to 1941, even as she penned masterpiece upon masterpiece, Virginia Woolf kept a diary. She poured into it her thoughts, feelings, concerns, objections, interests, and disappointments-resulting in twenty-six volumes that give unprecedented insight into the mind of a genius. Collected here...
Elegy for Iris
Bayley, John
Paper Book
A moving memoir by the husband of the great contemporary writer Dame Iris Murdoch captures the ineffable mystery and fascination that she has exerted on both him and her readers and chronicles her recent sad struggle with Alzheimer's disease. 25,000 first printing. First serial, The New Yorker.
Mockingbird : a portrait of Harper Lee
Shields, Charles J.
Paper Book
The colorful life of the remarkable woman who created To Kill a Mockingbird - the classic that became a touchstone for generations of Americans To Kill a Mockingbird, the twentieth-century's most widely read American novel, has sold thirty million copies and still sells a million...
Prairie fires : the American dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
Fraser, Caroline
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR The first comprehensive historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the...
Virginia Woolf
Hermione Lee
Paper Book
With epic scope and a rich use of detail, Hermione Lee has created a miraculously evocative portrait that lets us know as never before how Virginia Woolf looked, how she sounded, how she dressed and behaved, and how she wrote. She shows us a brave, powerfully intelligent woman who suffered from a...
The Bronts︠ : [wild genius on the moors: the story of a literary family]
Barker, Juliet R. V.
Paper Book
The story of the tragic Brontë family is familiar to everyone: we all know about the half-mad, repressive father, the drunken, drug-addicted wastrel of a brother, wildly romantic Emily, unrequited Anne, and "poor Charlotte." Or do we? These stereotypes of the popular imagination are precisely that-...
Anne Sexton : a biography
Middlebrook, Diane Wood
Paper Book
Anne Sexton began writing poetry at the age of twenty-nine to keep from killing herself. She held on to language for dear life and somehow -- in spite of alcoholism and the mental illness that ultimately led her to suicide -- managed to create a body of work that won a Pulitzer Prize and that still...
Romantic outlaws : the extraordinary lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley
Gordon, Charlotte.
Paper Book
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SEATTLE TIMES This groundbreaking dual biography brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the...
Edith Wharton
Lee, Hermione.
Paper Book
Delving into heretofore untapped sources, the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf brilliantly interweaves Edith Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age.
Bobbed hair and bathtub gin : writers running wild in the Twenties
Meade, Marion
Paper Book
Traces the intersecting lives of writers Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber, describing how their relationships with such men as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Harold Ross, as well as period attitudes about economic independence and sexual freedom, affected their live
Shirley Jackson : a rather haunted life
Franklin, Ruth
Paper Book
Instantly heralded for its "masterful" and "thrilling" portrayal (Boston Globe), Shirley Jackson reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the literary genius behind such classics as "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House. In this "remarkable act of reclamation" (Neil...
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson
Alfred Habegger
Paper Book
Emily Dickinson, probably the most loved and certainly the greatest of American poets, continues to be seen as the most elusive. One reason she has become a timeless icon of mystery for many readers is that her developmental phases have not been clarified. In this exhaustively researched biography,...
Margaret Fuller : a new American life
Marshall, Megan.
Paper Book
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography   From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England's intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women's sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary...
The soul of a woman : on impatient love, long life, and good witches
Allende, Isabel
Paper Book
From the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea comes "a bold exploration of womanhood, feminism, parenting, aging, love and more" (Associated Press). "The Soul of a Woman is Isabel Allende's most liberating book yet."--Elle
Reading Jackie : her autobiography in books
Kuhn, William M.
Paper Book
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis never wrote a memoir, but she told her life story and revealed herself in intimate ways through the nearly 100 books she brought into print during the last two decades of her life as an editor at Viking and Doubleday. Based on archives and interviews with Jackie's...
A secret sisterhood : the literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront,︠ George Eliot & Virginia Woolf
Midorikawa, Emily
Paper Book
Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend; think Byron and Shelley, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the world's best-loved female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Coauthors and real-life friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove...
The invention of Angela Carter : a biography
Gordon, Edmund
Paper Book
Angela Carter is widely considered one of the best loved and most highly acclaimed English writers of the last hundred years. She was prolific and inventive, producing an astounding range of innovative novels, short stories, screenplays, and essays that won her the admiration and respect of readers...
The adventures of Miss Barbara Pym : a biography
Byrne, Paula
Paper Book
'Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously' JILLY COOPER Picked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the Observer A Radio 4 Book of the Week, April 2021 Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of...
The prosaic soul of nikki giovanni
Giovanni, Nikki.
Ebook
For the first time, the collected prose of national treasure Nikki Giovanni--featuring: Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black PoetNominated for the National Book Award, this is a journey--both private and public--through the trials and...

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