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
Sylvia Plath
Ebook
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  ...
0101812613129
920 C4628A
Paper Book
Back in print in an all-new edition, is the engaging and illuminating chronicle of the life of the "Queen of Mystery." Fans of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple and readers of John Curran's fascinating biographies Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks and Murder in the Making will be spellbound by...
0101807176157
920 M6114MI
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...
0101805774573
920 AU74T
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...
0101813892763
920 D562B
Paper Book
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 Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts...
0101806213597
920 M9405B
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.
0101810071403
920 L51248S
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...
0101815338500
BKM 813 W643ZFR
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...
0101805826167
920 W882L
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...
0101805171267
929.2 B78B
Paper Book
A definitive history of this fascinating literary family written by a Bronte scholar and former curator and librarian at the Bronte Parsonage Museum. Barker's hefty opus integrates newly-discovered manuscripts and letters from every member of the family as well as fine photographs and reproductions...
0101804079016
920 SE91M
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...
0101813727704
920 W836GO
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...
0101811089958
813 W55ZL
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
Marion Meade
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
Ruth Franklin
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...
0101807178468
920 D564H
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,...
0101813768526
920 F9595MA
Paper Book
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography "Thoroughly absorbing, lively . . . Fuller, so misunderstood in life, richly deserves the nuanced, compassionate portrait Marshall paints." -- Boston Globe Pulitzer Prize winner Megan Marshall recounts the trailblazing life of Margaret...
The Soul of a Woman
Isabel Allende
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
0101812125702
920 K3833KU
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...
0101815345125
820.9 M584S
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 Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym
Paula Byrne
Paper Book
'Captures both Barbara and her writing so miraculously' JILLY COOPERPicked as a Book to Look Forward to in 2021 by the Guardian, The Times and the ObserverA Radio 4 Book of the Week, April 2021 Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century,...
0101806182537
920 W468W
Paper Book
"Your private life should be kept private," said Eudora Welty in response to a question about the relevance of biography.  "My own I don't think would particularly interest anybody, for that matter.  But I'd guard it; I feel strongly about that.  They'd have a hard time trying to find out something...

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