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
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
Nancy Milford
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...
Blue Nights
Joan Didion
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...
Elegy for Iris
John Bayley
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
Charles J. Shields
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
Caroline Fraser
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 Brontčes :
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
Diane Middlebrook
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
Charlotte Gordon
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
Hermione Lee
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.
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...
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,...
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
Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books
William Kuhn
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 Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf
Emily Midorikawa
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...

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