Nava Atlas's Blog, page 87

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (July 3, 1860 – August 17, 1935) was an American author of fiction and nonfiction, praised for her feminist works that pushed for equal treatment of women and for breaking out of stereotypical roles.

She was one of the was one of the leading activists in the late 19th and early 20th century American women’s movement. Her nonfiction works on how women’s lives were impacted by social and economic bias are still relevant. Today, she’s best known for the semi-autobiographical work of short fiction, The Yellow Wallpaper.

Early life

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Charlotte was the daughter of Mary Perkins and Frederic Beecher Perkins. When she was an infant, her father abandoned the family. Mary was unable to support Charlotte and her brother, but fortunately, they were assisted by her father’s family. Among the notable Beechers of Hartford were her great-aunts, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Catharine Beecher. All were involved in women’s rights and it’s interesting to ponder how much Charlotte was influenced by them.

Charlotte also spent part of her childhood in Providence, Rhode Island. Her formal education was spotty, ending when she was just fifteen. Her mother showed little affection for her and her brother, yet discouraged them from making friends or reading.

When she was about eighteen, Charlotte reconnected with her absent father, who encouraged her to attend the Rhode Island School of Design. She began taking classes in 1878, and for a time, supported herself as an artist and private tutor.

Battle with postpartum depression

In 1884 Charlotte married Charles Stetson an artist. At first, she refused his proposal, feeling that he wasn’t right for her. As it turned out, she should have followed her instinct. Within their first year she gave birth to their daughter, Katharine Beecher Stetson. She succumbed to a serious bout of post-partum depression, exacerbated by the prevailing attitudes that women were frail creatures given to hysteria.

Stetson wasn’t inclined to allow her to do any activities to further herself, which led to her already depressed state to worsen. This experience was the basis for her 1892 semi-autobiographical novella (or long short story) The Yellow Wallpaper, arguably her best known work. More on this ahead.

Starting to flourish

By 1888, Charlotte left Charles Stetson. It can’t be overstated how rare this was for the time. She and her daughter Katharine moved to Pasadena, California. There she started becoming involved with feminist causes and organizations, and began writing and editing. She immersed herself in suffrage and was also taken up with labor and socialist organizations.

When Charlotte and husband weren’t formally divorced until 1894, he remarried at once. She sent Katharine to live with Charles and his second wife, stating in her memoir that Charles and Katharine had a right to know and love one another. She also felt that Stetson’s new wife would be just as good a mother to Katharine — perhaps even better — as she.

It was during these active, tumultuous years that Charlotte embarked on her path as a serious writer. In 1890, she had her first poem published and wrote more poetry, some fifteen essays, a novella, and what would become her best-known work, The Yellow Wallpaper. The latter first appeared in the New England Magazine in 1892.

During these years, she also became a lecturer, which became an important source not only of income, but of connection with like-minded feminist and social activists. She spoke about the issues that mattered to her: human rights, women’s issues, labor, social reform, and more.

The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)

What would become Charlotte’s most famous work was written in two days in June, 1890 in her Pasadena home. It was first published in the January, 1892 issue of New England Magazine and has since been included in numerous anthologies, including collections of American literature, women’s literature, textbooks, and of course, anthologies of her own work.

Charlotte draws on her personal experience with the postpartum depression she suffered from. For the sake of her health, as advised by her husband and physician, she’s isolated in a room and becomes fixated on its strange and ugly yellow wallpaper. The story is a statement on women’s lack of independence and on being at the mercy of physicians and other patriarchal forces to the detriment of their mental health. You can read the full text here and an analysis here.

Later, in an essay titled “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” (1913) Charlotte observed:

“For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia — and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country.

This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887.  I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.”

Read the rest of the essay here.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman page on Amazon

Women and Economics (1898)

When Charlotte moved back east in 1893, she made contact with Houghton Gilman, a first cousin who was a Wall Street attorney. The two became romantically involved and were married in 1900. She was apparently much happier and more fulfilled in her second marriage. In the intervening years, Charlotte continued to write, edit, and lecture.

She herself experienced some bias as an unconventional mother and as a divorced wife. She began to think about the social forces that oppressed women — even relatively privileged women. Shedding a light on the economic and social discrimination that forced women into second-class citizenship was the mission of her 1898 book, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Revolution. This hugely successful book, which was reprinted many times and translated into seven languages, is unfortunately still relevant today.

This classic treatise explored the roles of women in American society, particularly on the impacts of marriage and motherhood. She argued that motherhood wasn’t exclusive to working outside the home, that domestic tasks ought to be professionalized, and most of all, that women shouldn’t have to be financially dependent on men. It’s now considered a classic treatise from the first-wave feminist movement.

You might also like: Charlotte Perkins Gilman on feminist ideals

A prominent career

The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903) expanded on the themes in Women and Economics, and was equally influential. She pushed for women to rise up in the workforce and to expand their lives beyond homemaking and childbearing.

Charlotte wrote, edited, published, and promoted her own magazine, The Forerunner, from 1909 to 1916. In it she presented some of her fiction, including Herland (1915) which would go on to great renown in the future as a feminist utopian novel.

After closing down The Forerunner, Charlotte wrote hundreds of essays and articles for various publications, and in 1925, began her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which would be published in 1935, just after her death.

Controversial views on race and immigration

Charlotte was so progressive in her views and theories about gender equality that it’s jarring to learn about some of her views on race and immigration. Her views in the 1909 essay A Suggestion on the Negro Problem is incredibly racist; there’s no way to sugar-coat it.

And she held rather nationalistic views for someone so dedicated to equality. She had harsh words at times for immigrants, for example, that they were diluting the “reproductive purity” of Americans of British decent. She famously said of herself “I am an Anglo-Saxon before everything.” She has been labeled a “eugenics feminist.”

Later years and legacy

In 1932, Charlotte was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. In 1934, her husband died of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage, and she moved to Pasadena to be near her daughter. The following year, she committed suicide by overdosing on chloroform.

Gilman left behind a suicide note stating that she chose chloroform over cancer. Published verbatim in the newspapers, it further read, “When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”

Gilman will always be remembered for her visionary feminist writings, lectures, and passion for social justice and women’s rights. During her lifetime she was a tireless activist and lecturer for the causes she was passionate about. In 1994 she was welcomed into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and named one of the most influential women of the twentieth century.

Her legacy continues through her powerful literature. Her works are bold and progressive and relatable to future generations of feminists. Unfortunately, her nationalistic, racist, and anti-immigrant stances means that the good that she did needs to be balanced with the harmful aspects of her thinking.

See also: Books by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

More about Charlotte Perkins Gilman on this site

8 Feminist Quotes 
On Feminist Ideals
Gilman’s 1911 Version of “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes
“Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” (1913)
Women and Economics (1898) — an excerpt
The Giant Wistaria — an analysis
The Yellow Wallpaper — an analysis
Books by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Full texts on this site

The Yellow Wallpaper
The Giant Wistar ia

Major Works

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was incredibly  prolific. This represents a tiny fraction of her output, which also included essays, stories, and poetry, not all of which ended up in book form.

The Yellow Wallpaper   (1892)
Women and Economics  (1898)
What Diantha Did  (1909 –1910)
The Crux (1911)
Moving the Mountain (1911)
The Man-Made World; Or, Our Androcentric Culture  (1911)
Herland  (1915)
With Her in Ourland (1916)

Autobiographies and Biographies

The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography
The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography by Cynthia Davis

More Information

Wikipedia
Reader discussion of Gilman’s books on Goodreads
The Evolution of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Read and listen online

Gilman’s books on audio on Librivox.org
Project Gutenberg

8 Feminist Quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

*This post contains affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, The Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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George Sand

George Sand (born Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin; July 1, 1804 – June 8, 1876) was a French novelist, essayist and playwright. She was also known for pushing the envelope on gender roles and the drama in her everyday life, not the least of which were her countless romantic entanglements.

Some put her literary legacy at eighty novels, others at seventy, in addition to several plays and countless shorter works, including: essays, journalistic pieces, and a multi-volume autobiography. It would be nearly impossible for any contemporary writer to emulate such prolific output, but she remains a model for creating a full palette of love, productivity, and family.

Early life and first marriage

In her youth, Aurore, as she was called, lived and studied for a time in a convent. When she returned home, she studied nature and the works of philosophers. Her penchant for wearing men’s clothing later in her life may have been planted by  her tutor, who encouraged her to wear trousers and shirts while riding horses, something she loved doing, as it gave her a feeling of freedom.

Aurore was only 19 when she married Casimir Dudevant, the son of a baron and a servant girl. Not a bad sort, though crude, he didn’t live up to her romantic expectations of what a husband should be. She left him eight years later — leaving their two children behind as well. She was off to Paris and started earning her own living by writing articles. Imagine how revolutionary this was for a woman in the early 1830s! It was at this time that she also began associating with other writers, some of whom became her mentors; others, her lovers.

Quotes by George Sand on Life, Love, and Work

Becoming George Sand

When Aurore fell in love with the charming young writer Jules Sandeau, they began collaborating on some writings and were collectively “J. Sand.” Soon after, she began using George Sand as her own pseudonym, starting with her first novel, Indiana (1832). It was a controversial novel from the start, and she enjoyed telling critics just where they could get off in a later edition of the book.

After her affair with Sandeau ended, she took up with Alfred de Musset, a poet. It was during the time of this relationship that she took custody of her daughter, Solange, while her husband, from whom she was legally separated, kept their son, Maurice.

Immensely productive

George Sand made a habit of pleading pity for her “literary agonies.” Despite her complaints, the word “prolific” is woefully inadequate to describe her output. Aside from her published books, she also wielded a journalistic pen to give voice to her concerns for women’s rights and social justice.

She started her own newspaper right around the time of the revolution of 1848 to disseminate her progressive and socialist views. When the revolution began that year, women had no legal rights, and Sand felt strongly that no society could advance under those circumstances. Yet despite how attuned she was to injustice, she managed to remain an optimist.

After publishing Indiana, she went on to write Lélia (1833), Mauprat (1837), Consuelo (1843), Le Meunieer d’Angibault (1845), and many others. Autobiographical works such as Elle et Lui, about her affair with Musset, were also part of her literary output. She ran a small private theater at her Nohant estate, at which she staged the plays she wrote, and sometimes performed in them.

Despite her own protestations to the contrary, George Sand found the discipline to produce an immense body of work. Until her surprisingly mellow older age, she was more adept at self-flagellation than self-congratulation.

George Sand on the Agony and Ecstasy of the Writing Life

Many lovers

You can be sure that the Masterpiece Theatre version of Sand’s life focused more on her adventures in the bedroom than at her desk. Her most notable love interest was legendary composer Frederic Chopin, and her most controversial, with the glamorous actress Marie Dorval.

George Sand was on the whole an adoring mother, but for her, motherhood was often fraught with the kind of drama that colored many of her relationships. Her son Maurice was a major mama’s boy, causing petty jealousy for Sand’s live-in lover, Frédéric Chopin. Could it have been from spite that he unconsciously (or not so unconsciously) fell in love with Sand’s daughter, Solange, when she was a pretty and flirtatious young lady of seventeen?

Her well-known love life, though tumultuous, was something on which she thrived, evidenced by this well-known quote of hers: “There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.”

Expressions of the masculine

One of the earliest and best-known cross-dressers, she wore men’s clothing both for comfort (for traveling, which she loved, apparently trousers were more practical than crinolines) and to make a statement. Similarly, she was famed (and mocked) for her public cigar-smoking, and never went far without her hookah.

In Lélia: The Life of George Sand, André Maurois writes touchingly: “Those who came to see the notorious lady who wore trousers and smoked cigars found instead a passionate and dedicated mind that transcended any of her gaudy poses. For in revolting against the conventions of the world, George Sand felt and suffered very much as a woman.”

You might also like: The Mellowing of George Sand

Paving the way for women

George Sand was admired by many of the leading figures of her day, with whom she developed abiding friendships, with or without love affairs. Notable among them were Franz Liszt, Victor Hugo, and George Henry Lewes. Lewes, one of the leading literary critics of the time wrote of her that she was “the most remarkable writer of the present century.” She maintained an abiding friendship and correspondence with fellow author Gustave Flaubert.

Though her oversized biography and persona are perhaps better known in the English-speaking world, her work was much admired by many of her literary contemporaries. It was, however, considered unseemly and completely unfeminine by others.  Not to diminish her work, but to some observers, her importance seemed to be more for the courage and originality of her life than her literary output.

A mellow old age

George Sand inherited an exquisite estate in Nohant, located in the Indre region of central France, which today is open to visitors. Before settling there permanently in her later years, she used it as a retreat from hectic city life in Paris  There she hosted a legion of writers and artists with whom she was friendly, including Delacroix, Turgenev, Flaubert, Liszt, and Balzac.

Aimee MacKenzie wrote in her 1921 introduction to The Gustave Flaubert-George Sand Letters: “In her final retreat at Nohant, surrounded by her affectionate children and grandchildren, diligently writing, botanizing, bathing in her little river, visited by her friends and undistracted by the fiery lovers of the old time, she shows an unguessed wealth of maternal virtue, swift, comprehending sympathy, fortitude, sunny resignation, and a goodness of heart that has ripened into wisdom.”   

She located to this idyllic locale permanently  for her last years. She loved to work in the garden, and tended to her grandchildren. More about her later golden years can be found in The Mellowing of George Sand: Mother, Grandmother, Gardener.

To her critics, Sand wrote, “The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.” Those who knew her well and admired her acknowledged her dual nature, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote, “Thou large-brained woman and large hearted man,” in her poem, George Sand: A Desire.

George Sand died at Nohant on June 8, 1876, not quite 72 years of age.

George Sand page on Amazon

More about George Sand on this site

George Sand on the Agony and the Ecstasy of the Writing Life
The Mellowing of George Sand
“To George Sand: A Desire” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Indiana by George Sand: The Author Answers Her Critics
Quotes by George Sand on Life, Love, and Work

Major Works (Novels)

This is but a tiny fraction of George Sand’s prodigious, almost ridiculously prolific output. She wrote and published many novels, as well as some one dozen plays and countless essays and other works of nonfiction.

Indiana   (1832)
Valentine (1832)
Lélia   (1833)
Jacques (1833)
Mauprat   (1837)
Consuelo   (1842)
La Mare au Diable   (1846)
Le Petite Fadette   (1849)

Biographies and Autobiographies

Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand 
George Sand  by Elizabeth Harlan
George Sand: A Biography  by Curtis Cate
Lélia: The Life of George Sand by André Maurois

More Information

Wikipedia
Reader discussion of Sand’s works on Goodreads

Listen and read online

George Sand on Project Gutenberg
Audio versions of Sand’s books on Librivox

Visit George Sand’s home

Nohant  – The George Sand estate in Nohant, France

*This post contains affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, The Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post George Sand appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) is best known as the author of Little Women and its sequels, including Jo’s Boys and Little Men, though the scope of her work goes far beyond these beloved books. She also wrote essays, poems, and pseudonymous thrillers. Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts.

Alcott’s most beloved heroine, the complicated and talented Jo March, was an idealized version of herself. And she did grow up in a family much like the one she presented in Little Women — once again, idealized and a bit altered — with practical and wise Marmee, a dreamer of a father, and three sisters, May (“Amy”), Anna (“Meg”), and Elizabeth (“Beth”).

Like Louisa, Jo was the aspiring writer among the sisters. What’s less well-known is that Alcott produced a large body of thrillers (otherwise known as gothics or sensational tales) under various pseudonyms, allowing her to support her family while searching for her literary voice. Contrary as they seemed to her own life and values, she seemed to take some perverse pleasure in dark themes, returning to them even after financial need no longer compelled her to do this sort of formula writing.

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10 Women Writers Who Were Inspired by Jo March

Determined to make a living as a writer

Alcott conducted her career as a professional determined to profit from her pen. Financial need stoked her drive as she became the primary breadwinner in her family at a young age. Inspiration was all around her, as she grew up in the midst of the Transcendentalists. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was one of its most passionate and radical proponents. He was a brilliant social theorist, but a poor provider, causing continuous financial stress for the family.

Louisa admired Charlotte Brontë and longed to gain recognition for her work, much as Brontë had. Though Alcott claimed that her greatest reward was the esteem of the “young folks” who were her readers, she was never modest in her demands to be paid what she felt she was worth, and lived to see her work earn a fortune. Most important to her was to make her family, especially her Marmee, comfortable.

A brief stint as Civil War nurse

During the Civil War, Louisa would have surely taken up arms if women had been allowed to serve as soldiers. But the only way women could serve was to volunteer as nurses, and that’s just what she did. After the crushing defeat of Union forces in Fredericksburg, December 1862, Louisa began her duties as a nurse at the Union Hotel in Georgetown, Washington D.C.

Disease was nearly as much a threat as wounds from the battlefield — not only to the soldiers themselves, but to those who cared for them. Not even a month into her service, Louisa came down with typhoid pneumonia, complete with a horrendous cough and a high fever. Her father came to fetch her and take her home, and she was in a delirium for some time after. More about this in her own civil war journals.

Louisa May Alcott as Civil War nurse

Little Women

Though Alcott had already produced the well-received Moods (the first novel under her real name), Work: A Story of Experience, Hospital Sketches, and countless small pieces under her own name, it was Little Women that really put her on the map. In 1868, her publisher asked that her to try writing a “girls’ story” for their list.

Thinking little of the request, she cranked it out in two and a half months, though her heart wasn’t in it. Neither she nor her publisher thought it was in any way remarkable. Still,  the proof of the entire book was ready in a month or so after the author turned in the manuscript, and once it came out, it was an immediate success, so much so, that sequels quickly followed.

More about how Louisa May Alcott came to write Little Women

A staunch feminist and abolitionist

She promoted women’s rights and campaigning for women’s suffrage. Her views were espoused by her lead characters, strong young women who wanted more from life than to get married and have babies. Alcott herself never married nor had children. She and her family were always ardent abolitionists, a view that was not as widely popular in relatively liberal Massachusetts as one would think.

Naïve about her sexuality

Despite all that she’d seen in life, Alcott was he was alarmingly naïve about the nature of her sexuality. She confessed in an 1883 interview: “I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body … because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.” Perhaps unknowingly, the repressed nature of her sexuality helped her avoid the circumscribed path of marriage and motherhood, and allowed her to view the institution dispassionately.

Here are some of Louisa May Alcott’s best loved quotes

A brief experience with motherhood

May Alcott Niereker, the youngest Alcott sister, trained as an artist in Europe (subsidized by Alcott’s earnings). There she met a man, married, and had a daughter.  She died within a year of giving birth. Alcott wanted to raise the child, and earned the father’s family’s consent do so. Adopted at the age of two, the little girl was her Aunt Louisa’s namesake (and nicknamed Lulu);  from all accounts, the nine years they spent together before Alcott’s death were happy ones.

Chronic illness and death

Louisa May Alcott was 55 years old when she died of a stroke in Boston in 1888. Her death came just two days after her father’s. She had long suffered from chronic illness, thought to have been caused by the mercury-laced medicine she took as a cure for the typhoid fever she suffered while serving as a nurse during the civil war. However, modern scholars believe that she may have had an autoimmune disease, perhaps lupus.

You might also like 10 Life Lessons from Louisa May Alcott

More about Louisa May Alcott on this site

10 Women Writers Who Were Inspired by Jo March
Louisa May Alcott quotes
How Louisa May Alcott’s Feminism Explains Her Timelessness
How Alcott Came to Write Little Women
A Visit to the Alcott’s Orchard House
Sweet Success at Last for Louisa May Alcott
10 Life Lessons from Louisa May Alcott
A Feminist Manifesto — Work: A Story of Experience
A Posthumous Interview with Louisa May Alcott
Madeleine B. Stern’s Brilliant analysis of Little Women
When You Don’t Have Enough Time to Write
The Boundless Hearts of Mothers
Comfort and Guidance in Little Women
My Head is My Study
“March” by Geraldine Brooks: A Review
Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott’s Obituary, March 1888
May Alcott Nierker: Thoroughly Modern Woman
Sketch of Childhood
LMA as Civil War Nurse
LMA’s Civil War journals
Dear Literary Ladies: Any Quick Tips for Plot and Character Development?
Dear Literary Ladies: How Can a Writer Improve Her Craft?
Dear Literary Ladies: Isn’t There an Easy Road to Writing Success?

Major Works 

Little Women
Jo’s Boys
Little Men
Rose in Bloom
Eight Cousins
Hospital Sketches
An Old-Fashioned Girl
Under the Lilacs
Moods
Work: A Story of Experience
Transcendental Wild Oats (full text)
A Long Fatal Love Chase 

Biographies About Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott: A Biography by Madeline B. Stern
The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen
Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson
Louisa: The Life of Louisa May Alcott by Yonda Zeldis McDonough

More Information

Wikipedia
Reader discussion of  Alcott’s books on Goodreads


Louisa May Alcott page on Amazon.com

Read and listen online

LMA’s books on Project Gutenberg
Audio readings of LMA’s books on Librivox

Film and TV adaptations of Louisa May Alcott Works

Little Women (1933)
Little Women (1949)
Little Women (1994)
Little Men  (1935)
Little Men  (1941)
Little Men  (1998)
The Inheritance (1997)
The Inheritance  (2003)
An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving (2008)

Visit Louisa May Alcott’s Home

Orchard House – Concord, MA
The Wayside – Concord, MA

*This post contains affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, The Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Must-Read Novellas by Classic Women Authors

If you’d like a taste of a classic author’s work but don’t have the time or patience to read a tome, consider the novella form. Here we’ll look at novellas by classic women authors that make great introductions to to their work. 

What defines a novella? It’s generally based on word count of between 17,000 and 40,000, though it isn’t always so cut and dry. The Awakening by Kate Chopin is often described as a novella, though its outside that parameter. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is about 6,000 words, yet has often been published as a stand-alone book (as well as in collections of this author’s stories). In terms of some standard definitions, that doesn’t even qualify as a novelette.

As far as page count, in a paper edition, depends on the size the font is set in, and the trim size of the paper. I personally view a novella as a work that’s under 200 pages in printed form — enough to sink your teeth into, yet never overwhelming.

In the hands of a skillful writer, a lot can be packed into a novella. Let’s go with a simple dictionary definition of the novella — “a work of fiction intermediate in length and complexity between a short story and a novel.” If you have any other suggestions for novellas by women authors of the past, comment below and we’ll add them to this post.

The Lifted Veil by George Eliot (1859)

The Lifted Veil by George Eliot is a shorter work by the British author best known for weighty books like Middlemarch. that departs sharply from the usual realism that’s a hallmark of her fiction. 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. It was the first and only of George Eliot’s works to delve into the genre of science fiction; this novella might also be considered horror and makes much use of suspense.

Transcendental Wild Oats by Louisa May Alcott (1873)

Transcendental Wild Oats by Louisa May Alcott is a satire, somewhere in length between a novelette and novella, about her family’s misadventures as part of the Fruitlands community in the 1840s. Alcott thinly disguised the members of the Transcendentalist community, most notably, her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, who was a co-founder of the community. You can read this work in its entirety on this site.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman remains a classic in feminist literature. Some might consider it a longer short story rather than a novella, but either way, it feels like it belongs on this list. In her 1913 essay, “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman revealed that the story was a reflection of the postpartum depression she suffered from, and her hopes that it would enlighten other women who experienced it.

But just as important, it’s a story of a woman whose creativity and freedom are thwarted by the strict gender roles proscribed by her time, culture, and class. You can read the full text here.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin (1899)

The Awakening is a short novel by Kate Chopin, published in 1899. It’s the story of Edna Pontellier, who struggles with her role as wife and mother in the stratified social milieu of New Orleans in the late 1800s. Now considered a feminist classic, it was met with mixed reviews at best upon its original publication. It was banned by many libraries and bookstores, only to be rediscovered, and is now considered a masterpiece of feminist fiction. Here is the full text.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (1911)

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton is admittedly depressing, but so beautifully told that many readers return to it again and again. An original 1911 review sketches the outline of the tale: “Twenty years before the tale opens we learn that Ethan Frome has been crippled in a terrible accident … Ethan had his old parents to take care of and after their death he married the young woman who had helped him to nurse them … In a few years she needed assistance, so a young poor relation, Mattie Silver, came to live with them. Slowly she and Ethan fell in love.” What happens next isn’t “happily ever after.”

Lost Laysen by Margaret Mitchell (1916)

Surprise! Lost Laysen, a novella by Margaret Mitchell, the author of the Gone With the Wind, was found decades after her death. According to the publisher: “The impossible has happened: the world has another story from Margaret Mitchell. Written in 1916, when the author was in her mid-teens, it’s a delight — a fitting predecessor to America’s most beloved epic novel. A spirited tale of love and honor on a doomed south Pacific island called Laysen, Lost Laysen would be justly praised as a charming effort by a remarkable young talent if it were its author’s only work.”

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers (1951)

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers centers around the eccentric Miss Amelia, owner of the formerly thriving café. When a hunchback wanders into town, followed by Amelia’s her shiftless former husband, emotions swell and collide. A review of the story from the year in which it was published offered this praise:

“McCullers with the fine hand of a craftsman and the insight of a poet explores the emotions of jealousy and loneliness in the troubled depths of abnormal personality.” The Ballad of the Sad Café gives a brief but compelling introduction to the work of this classic Southern writer.

The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty (1954)

The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty is a 1954 novella originally published in The New Yorker magazine the year before it appeared in book form. Narrated by Edna Earle Ponder, it’s the story of her uncle, Daniel Ponder, a sweet man who is considered a bit “slow.” He has inherited a hefty fortune from his father and wants to give it away. Not surprisingly, his plan is opposed by the extended family. This charming story was turned into a Broadway play as well as a made-for-television film.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys  (1966)

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is the last work by this Dominican-British author. Considered a prequel and response to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, the novella presents the perspective of Antoinette Cosway, the sensual Creole heiress who wound up as the “madwoman in the attic.” This short novel became her most successful novel, praised for its spare yet evocative language and its exploration of the power imbalance between men in women, between patriarchal colonizers and the original inhabitants of the Caribbean in the 1830s.

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Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë (April 21, 1816 – March 31, 1855), the British novelist, lived a life that was both romantic and tragic. Born in Thornton, a small West Yorkshire village in England, she was part of a clerical family that valued education. She was the family chronicler and champion, leading the charge for herself and her two equally brilliant sisters, Emily and Anne in their quest for publication.

Charlotte and her siblings lived with their parents, Patrick Brontë, an Anglican clegyman of Irish descent, and Maria Branwell, Haworth, an isolated town on the moors of northern England.

Maria died in 1821, when Charlotte was five, leaving the household to be run by her sister and servants. She was the third child born to the Brontës; her older sisters Maria, named for her mother, and Elizabeth, each died around the age of ten. Next to Charlotte in age was Branwell, the only brother, then Emily, and finally Anne.

An erratic childhood

In 1824, Charlotte and her sisters, their departed mother’s namesake Maria, along with Elizabeth Emily, were sent to a school for daughters of the clergy. Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis; Charlotte and Emily returned home. It’s believed that Charlotte modeled the Lowood school setting at the beginning of Jane Eyre on her experiences. She blamed the deaths of her sisters on the poor conditions at the school.

The children were supposedly “educated” at home, but were left very much to their own devices. They invented an imaginary world called Angria, inspired by a box of wooden soldiers Mr. Brontë had brought home for Branwell Together,Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell — constructed magazines and put on plays.

Becoming a teacher and governess

In 1831, when in her mid-teens, Charlotte once again went away to school at Roehead, and modeled some of the characters in her future books on the friends she made. In 1835, she returned to Roehead as a teacher, and a few years later, she and Anne attempted to make their living as governesses, a profession that neither cared for.

In 1842, Charlotte and Emily left for Brussels, Belgium, to study at the Pensionnat Héger. They studied French, German, and literature, thinking to prepare themselves to be teachers or start their own school in the future. There Charlotte fell in love with the married Héger, and used her experiences in her thinly disguised first novel, The Professor, which met with no success in her lifetime (it was published posthumously). Her novel Villette was also inspired by this period of her life.

A 19th century description of Charlotte

The Chicago Tribune (June 28, 1885) published an in-depth article about the Brontë family some 30 years after Charlotte’s death; of course, after she had survived all of her siblings. It read:

“She was very plain-looking, very small, and near-sighted, with the tiniest hands and feet ever seen on a grown-up woman. She had long and abundant hair, which was her only claim to beauty, though her eyes lighted up with emotion and seemed to illuminate her face. She had  great constancy and strength of affection, and an almost morbid sense of duty. She was capable of strong, passionate feeling, though usually self-contained, and was painfully shy, owing, doubtless to her secluded life.”

The Brontë sisters, in a painting by their brother, Branwell.

She wrote much about their paths to publication

The quest for publication

In the early 1840s, Charlotte discovered a stash of Emily’s poems and recognized the genius in them. She undertook the task of finding a home for a collaborative book of poems by herself and her two sisters. They took masculine noms de plume (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were Currer, Ellis, and Acton, respectively, and shared the faux surname Bell).

The book was dryly titled Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell’s Poems, finally did find a publisher, though they were, as was the custom, required to front the money for its printing. It was published in 1846 to absolutely no fanfare and humiliating sales of two copies.

Bruised but undaunted, the sisters, who had all been working on book-length novels, set about to find publishers for them, with the effort once again spearheaded by Charlotte. She wrote of her efforts in the Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell, 1850:

“Ill-success failed to crush us: the mere effort to succeed had given a wonderful zest to existence; it must be pursued. We each set to work on a prose tale: Ellis Bell produced Wuthering Heights, Acton Bell, Agnes Grey, and Currer Bell also wrote a narrative in one volume [referring to The Professor]. These MSS. were perseveringly obtruded upon various publishers for the space of a year and a half; usually, their fate was an ignominious and abrupt dismissal…”

The manuscript for The Professor made its rounds and was rejected everywhere, while Emily and Anne’s novels did find publishers. There was a glimmer of hope when one publisher responded that she should send her next work to them, so she wrote and sent the manuscript for Jane Eyre, which was published just six weeks after its acceptance (in the autumn of 1847), and became an immediate bestseller.

Charlotte Brontë page on Amazon

Jane Eyre: fame and controversy

Jane Eyre is Charlotte’s best known novel, telling of its title heroine’s love for the inscrutable and reclusive Mr. Rochester and her quest for independence. Though it has been considered a feminist work, it’s also in the realm of the gothic novel due to that little detail of Rochester’s mad wife locked away in an attic. The book sparked a fair amount of controversy when first published; even more so when critics began to suspect that it was the work of a woman, as she had published it under her masculine pseudonym, Currer Bell. Responding to such criticism, she wrote:

“To value praise or stand in awe of blame we must respect the source whence the praise and blame proceed, and I do not respect an inconsistent critic. He says, ‘If Jane Eyre be the production of a woman, she must be a woman unsexed.’ In that case the book is an unredeemed error and should be unreservedly condemned. Jane Eyre is a woman’s biography, by a woman it is professedly written. If it is written as no woman would write, condemn it with spirit and decision — say it is bad, but do not eulogise and then detract.

I am reminded of The Economist. The literary critic of that paper praised the book if written by a man, and pronounced it ‘odious’ if the work of a woman. To such critics I would say, ‘To you I am neither man nor woman — I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me — the sole ground on which I accept your judgement.'” (— From a letter to her editor, W.S Williams, August 1849)

In 1848, Charlotte and Anne were compelled to visit their publishers in London and revealed themselves as the real “Currer Bell” and “Acton Bell.”

You might also like: Charlotte’s Quotes on the Writing Life

Other works

Shirley (1849) followed Jane Eyre two years later. It’s the story set against the Luddite riots of the Yorkshire textile industry, 1807 to 1812. Villette (1853) is the story of Lucy Snow, helplessly in love with Paul Emanuel. It’s a fairly autobiographical novel, based on Charlotte’s experiences in Brussels and her unrequited love for Professor Héger. Though these books have never been as widely read as Jane Eyre, all three novels have in common a keen insight into human nature, and despite some questionable decisions in the realms of love, a fierce self-belief in personal integrity and independence shared by the heroines.

Charlotte approached fiction writing in such an original way that it attracted many to her romantic yet deeply emotional tales and gained her lasting stature in the world of literature.

Loss of siblings, a brief marriage, and death

Her brother Branwell and two sisters, Emily and Anne, died tragically young of illness when barely out of their twenties. Some years earlier, in 1839, Charlotte Brontë had declined a marriage proposal, writing: “I am not the serious, grave, cool-hearted individual you suppose; you would think me romantic and eccentric.” But she did ultimately marry Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854. After her  beloved sisters died in 1848 and 1849, and with Branwell gone as well, the marriage helped ease the loneliness she must have felt living with just her father in the parsonage.

By all accounts, the marriage began happily. Nicholls was, like her father, a curate, and she involved herself in his work, becoming a bit less isolated. But it wasn’t to last. In 1855, she died in Haworth, England at the age of 38. She was pregnant, caught pneumonia, and possibly became dehydrated These complications contributed to her death.

During the last stages of her illness she woke to find her husband weeping over her and said, “O, I am not going to die, am I? God will not separate us; we have been so happy.” Her unborn child did not survive. Patrick Branwell Brontë, the family patriarch, survived all six of his children.

Two years after her death, Charlotte’s first novel, The Professor, was published. The publication of Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell was also published that same year (1957), helping to seal her legacy and reputation.

More about Charlotte Brontë on this site

Charlotte’s Preface to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 
Based Upon the Book: An Interview with Charlotte Brontë 
Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell
Quotes from Jane Eyre
Du Maurier’s Rebecca: A Worthy ‘Eyre’ Apparent
CB’s Quotes on Her Writing Life
The Brontë Sisters’ Path to Publication
Jane Eyre and I: A Love Affair for Life
Teaching Jane Eyre: A Professor’s Perspective
Charlotte Brontë’s Obituary
Jane Eyre — 1943 Film

Major Works

Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell  (1846)
Jane Eyre   (1847)
Shirley  (1849)
Villette   (1853)
The Professor  (1857; posthumous)

Biographies about Charlotte Brontë and the Brontë Sisters

The Life of Charlotte Brontë   by Elizabeth Gaskell (full text)
Charlotte Brontë: A Writer’s Life   by Rebecca Fraser
Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life   by Lyndall Gordon
The Brontë Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne

by Catherine Reef
The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors   by Juliet Baker
Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart  by Claire Harmon

More Information

Wikipedia
Brontë Blog
Charlotte Brontë on Goodreads
Charlotte Brontë’s page on Amazon

Read and listen

Charlotte Brontë – eText Archive and Study Guide
Audio Recordings of Charlotte Brontë Works on Librivox
Charlotte Brontë on Project Gutenberg
Charlotte Brontë page on Amazon.com 

Articles, News, Etc.

The 100 Best Novels: No. 12 – Jane Eyre
Museum to Open its Doors to Jane Eyre Exhibition
The Fascinating, Handwritten Poems of Famous Authors
February 21, 1855: Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
Is Jane Eyre a Feminist Icon?
January 13, 1849: Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams
12 Genuinely Great Books About May-December Romances
Walking: The Brontë Trail
Letter from Charlotte Brontë to her brother Branwell, 1 May 1843
Charlotte Brontë: Mixing the Familiar and the Fantastic 
How to Turn Down a Marriage Proposal like Charlotte Brontë
Excerpt from Shirley by Charlotte Brontë
Anonymous Review of Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre and the 19th-century Woman

Film adaptations

Jane Eyre (1943)
Jane Eyre (1997)
Jane Eyre (2007, Masterpiece Theater)
Jane Eyre (2011)

Visit 

The Brontë Birthplace 
Haworth Parsonage

*This post contains affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, The Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Douglas Johnson (September 10, 1880 – May 14, 1966) was an American poet and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Born Georgia Douglas Camp in Atlanta, Georgia, she grew up in a mixed-race family with African-American, Native American, and English roots.

Her poetry addressed issues of race as well as personal intensely issues that are ultimately universal, including love and motherhood, and being a woman in a male-dominated world. Four collections of her poetry were published: The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and Share My World (1962). She wrote nearly thirty plays and numerous other works, though many have been lost.

Settling in Washington, D.C.

Georgia graduated from Atlanta University’s Normal College 1893, then studied music at Oberlin Conservatory and the Cleveland College of Music. Her first line of work was as a teacher and an assistant principal in Atlanta.

After her marriage to Henry Lincoln Johnson, an attorney and government worker, the couple moved to Washington, D.C., in 1910. He wanted her to be a traditional wife and mother, caring for their home and two sons. Despite the lack of enthusiastic support from her husband, Georgia managed to find a way to write.

First publications

Georgia was in her mid-thirties when she first had her poems published in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine in 1916. Her first book of poetry, The Heart of a Woman, was published in 1918. Jessie Redmon Fauset, who was poised to become the literary editor of The Crisis, helped select the poems for the book.

The Heart of a Woman featured poems that were personal to her life, yet universal to the female experience. They spoke of love, loneliness, and life’s disappointments. In graceful terms, her frustration with women’s constrained roles was expressed as well. The title of this book was the inspiration for Maya Angelou’s 1981 memoir of the same name.

Bronze, Geogia’s second collection of poetry was published in 1922. In this volume, the poems more directly confronted themes of race.

A literary salon in the capital

Though Georgia was never a resident of New York City, the heart of the Harlem Renaissance, her Washington home became an important literary salon. She became a welcoming host to her fellow writers, Among the regular visitors were Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, and many of the noted women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. It was considered one of the great literary salons of the era, removed as it was from its geographic center.

The house on S Street NW came to be known as the “S Street Salon” — a satellite of sorts for writers in the nation’s segregated capital.

You might also like: 

Renaissance Women: 12 Female Writers of the Harlem Renaissance

A productive decade

When Georgia’s husband died in 1925, she was forty-five years old and had to find a way to support their teenage sons. She worked at temporary jobs, including as a file clerk for Civil Service and as a substitute teacher. Though she was finally hired by the Department of Labor, she worked long hours for low pay.

Despite these obstacles, the twenties were a busy and productive period. She wrote a weekly syndicated column, “Homely Philosophy,” which ran from 1926 to 1932, and a number of plays. Blue Blood was staged in 1926 and Plumes in1927. She also traveled far and wide in the twenties, doing readings and giving lectures.

An Autumn Love Cycle (1928) returned to the more personal themes explored in The Heart of a Woman. This collection included “I Want to Die While You Love Me,” perhaps her best-known and most widely reprinted poem. An Autumn Love Cycle is generally Georgia Douglas Johnson’s most widely praised collection.

Challenges

Georgia lost her job at the Department of Labor job in 1934. She returned to doing temporary clerical jobs and whatever other work she could find. Through her hard work and determination, she sent her sons through college. Henry Johnson, jr., went to Bowdoin College and Howard University Law School. Peter Johnson attended Dartmouth college, and completed his medical degree at Howard University.

Maintaining her literary career while having to survive financially and send her sons through college was difficult. In the 1940s and 50s, Georgia sporadically published poems and appeared on radio programs, but it wouldn’t be until the early 1960s that her next collection would be published.

Bronze by Georgia Douglas Johnson on Amazon

Later years

Later in her life, Georgia moved in with Henry Lincoln, Jr. and his wife. Her last collection of poetry was published in 1962. Share My World reflected her life experience and wisdom. Despite the challenges she faced, Georgia continued to be generous to fellow artists, and an enthusiast of all things literary and artistic.

In 1962 – 63, Georgia compiled a “Catalogue of Writings.” She listed twenty-eight plays, though only a few have been preserved. She also listed a manuscript about her literary salon and a novel, both of which have also been lost. Of thirty-one short stories she listed, only three have been found. Her personal papers are gone.

All of these published and unpublished works might have been thrown away by mistake while clearing out her belongings after her death. It’s tragic to think that the prolific output of this talented and determined writer will never be recovered. There are hardly any surviving photos of her, either.

Georgia Douglas Johnson received an honorary doctorate in literature from Atlanta University in 1965. She remained active into her eighties and died of a sudden stroke in 1966.

Contemporary analysis

Though Georgia Douglas Johnson’s surviving body of work isn’t large, it continues to be well regarded. In The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995), Eugenia Collier wrote:

“Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poems are skillfully crafted lyrics cast in traditional forms. They are, for the most part, gentle and delicate, using soft consonants and long, low vowels. Their realm is emotion, often sadness and disappointment, but sometimes fulfillment, strength, and spiritual triumph. Yet Johnson herself was never otherworldly. She remained in the forefront of political and social events of her time.

Her plays were moving portrayals of the tragic impact of racism upon African-Americans. Frequent themes in both her poetry and drama are the alienation and dilemmas of the person of mixed blood and the goal of integration into the American mainstream.”

More on this site by Georgia Douglas Johnson

10 Poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson 

Poetry Collections 

The Heart of a Woman (1918)
Bronze  (1922)
An Autumn Love Cycle (1928)
Share My World (1962)

Plays

The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson , edited by Judith L. Stephens (2006)

More information on Georgia Douglas Johnson

Poetry Foundation
Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Life and Career
Georgia Douglas Johnson: Harlem Renaissance Writer
All Poetry: Georgia Douglas Johnson
Goodreads
Wikipedia

*This post contains affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, The Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Willa Cather

Willa Silbert Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947), author of classic American fiction, was born in Winchester, Virginia. At nine years of age, her family moved from the staid, conservative life of Virginia society to Red Cloud, Nebraska. Growing up among hardworking European immigrants who worked the land inspired some of her best-known works. 

In this untamed landscape, young Willa Cather rode her pony about to get to know her foreign-born neighbors who were homesteading on the Great Plains. She observed their struggles to conquer an unforgiving land with its extremes of droughts, blizzards, storms, and prairie fires.

Though it would be some time before she turned her hand to fiction, her Norwegian, Swedish, and German neighbors were the basis of characters in her best known novels, including O Pioneers! and My Antonia. Cather’s respect for the immigrants’ devotion to the land is reflected in these stories and their characters.

Formative years

Willa graduated from Red Cloud High School in 1890, and went on to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Because she had spent time with the local doctor in Red Cloud, her intention was to study medicine. While pursuing her studies, she also edited the University’s magazine, and began reviewing plays in local papers.

Recognizing her talent for writing, her college classmates secretly submitted an essay she wrote to the Nebraska State Journal. Seeing her work in print promptly changed her plans: “Up to that time I had planned to specialize in medicine … But what youthful vanity can be unaffected by the sight of itself in print! It was a kind of hypnotic effect.”

In 1892, a short story titled “Peter” was published in a Boston publication. Similarly, without her knowledge, this story was submitted to The Mahogany Tree, a Boston-based literary magazine, by her English professor.

Like many authors before and since, Willa first worked as a journalist, starting with a position at the aforementioned Nebraska State Journal as she completed her college studies in the 1890s. Her first post-graduation position was on the editorial staff of McClure’s magazine in New York City, where she worked her way up to managing editor.

She credited the fast pace of newspaper and magazine production for helping to work off what she described as the “purple flurry” of her early writing attempts. 

You might also like: Cather on the Art of Fiction

Productive years

Cather’s publishing debut came as a poet, with a collection titled April Highlights (1903). It remained her only volume of poetry.

The Troll Garden (1905), a collection of short stories, was Cather’s first published book of fiction, completed in her early days in New York City. After putting in six years as an editor, Alexander’s Bridge, her first novel, was published in 1912. After that, she devote her full efforts to writing fiction.

When New England author Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) became Willa Cather’s mentor, she urged her to shed her fixation on writing like Henry James and instead mine memories of her youth in Red Cloud for inspiration. The prairies and immigrant families of Cather’s childhood home inspired the classics she’s best remembered for. 

O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia came in quick succession in the nineteen-teens. Several novels, all well received, came out in the twenties. One of Ours (1922) received a Pulitzer Prize the following year. Death Comes for the Archbishop, considered one of her finest, was published in 1927.

In these post WWI-years, Cather was distressed by the growth of materialism and the loss of the pioneering spirit of the country that had informed so many of her most successful works.

Her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), was possibly her least well-reviewed novel, but it was the capstone of a truly stellar career in American letters.

Edith Lewis

Even as a child, Cather recognized her masculine aspect. She went through a phase of wearing her hair completely shorn, wearing boys’ clothing, and asking to be called “William.” As a teen, she often signed her name as “William Cather, Jr.”

She fell in love with a few young women in her youth, though she was never open about discussing her sexuality. A product of her time, she may have felt it could harm her career. To her credit, she didn’t marry a man just to keep up appearances.

Edith Lewis, like Cather, was an editor at McClure’s Magazine. The two women became life partners and lived together in New York City for 40 years. Lewis served as a personal editor to Cather. She outlived Cather by many years, and served as her literary executor. They are buried together in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

See also: My Antonia by Willa Cather

An artist of distinction

Cather’s novels, known for their stark beauty and spare language, reflect her philosophy that writing is an art as well as a craft (and a skill) that can be honed and polished. She advised aspiring writers to spill out all their overwrought, adjective-laden prose, allowing clearer focus and language to come through in one’s writing. Cather’s considerable wisdom has been fully preserved, especially in the numerous interviews she granted — despite her professed disdain for the press and with fame in general.

Willa Cather died at age 73 of a cerebral hemorrhage in New York City, where she had lived for many years.

Willa Cather page on Amazon

More about Willa Cather on this site

Cather On the Art of Fiction
Review by Cather of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
5 Pieces of Writing Wisdom from Willa Cather 
Willa Cather Loved and Hated Fame & the Press
Dear Literary Ladies: How can I write, when I have so little time?
Dear Literary Ladies: How can I find my unique writing voice?

Major Works

The Troll Garden  (1905)
Alexander’s Bridge  (1912)
O Pioneers!  (1913)
The Song of the Lark  (1915)
My Ántonia  (1918)
A Lost Lady  (1923)
My Mortal Enemy  (1926)
The Professor’s House   (1925)
Death Comes for the Archbishop  (1927)
Shadows on the Rock   (1931)
Lucy Gayheart   (1935)
Sapphira and the Slave Girl    (1940)

Autobiographies and Biographies about  Willa Cather

Willa Cather in Europe: Her Own Story of the First Journey
Willa Cather: A Literary Life by James Woodress
The World of Willa Cather by Mildred R. Bennett
Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record by Edith Lewis

More Information

Cather on Wikipedia
The Willa Cather Foundation
Willa Cather: A Longer Biographical Sketch
PBS Documentary on Willa Cather: The Road is All
Reader discussions of Willa Cather’s books on Goodreads

Read and listen online

Cather public domain works on Project Gutenberg
Audio recordings of Cather’s public domain works on Librivox

Film adaptations of Cather’s books

O Pioneers! (1992)
My Antonia  (1995)
The Song of the Lark (2006)

Articles, News, Etc.

LGBT History: Famous Women Who Loved Women
A Lecture on Cather 
Willa Cather vs. Scott Fitzgerald 
January 2, 1896: Willa Cather to “Push”
Will Cather Was Skeptical of Analytics
Media Studies Experience: An Afternoon with Willa Cather
Willa Cather, Pioneer — an appreciation by Jane Smiley

Visit and research

Cather’s Childhood Home  – Red Cloud, NE
Cather Homes and Places – Red Cloud, NE and Gore, VA
The Willa Cather Archive – University of Nebraska, Lincoln

*This post contains affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, The Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937), was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City. One of the Grande Dames of American letters, everything about her, from her wealthy background to her stately demeanor suggests a woman in possession of herself. However, beneath the surface was a deep insecurity about her talent and abilities, one she gradually overcame in a substantial way.

Most of us have heard the expression “Keeping up with the Joneses.” But it might come as a surprise that this doesn’t refer to a hypothetical family, but Edith Wharton’s parents, George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones.

A privileged childhood

Born into the rarified late nineteenth-century world of wealth and privilege, her formative years consisted of riding, balls, coming-out parties, teas, and extended stays in Europe. When Edith was just four years old, she traveled throughout Europe with her parents, with stays in Spain, Germany, Italy, and France. Upon returning to New York, she was educated by private tutors.

Despite having homes in New York City and Newport, and the kind of money that gained them access to the finer things in life, culture and learning weren’t particularly valued by the Jones family. And though Edith lacked for nothing, it was a less-than-ideal upbringing for a bookish, dreamy girl.

Edith Wharton at around eight years of age; painting by Edward May Harrison, 1870

Writing wasn’t proper for a society girl

As a fledgling writer, she received out-and-out disapproval from those closest to her, including her mother and society friends, who thought that literary pursuits were beneath a person of her class. From society gadfly Edward “Teddy” Wharton, husband from her failed marriage, she received nothing but indifference.

Insecurity about her talent and abilities plagued her for years, and she admitted to suffering from terrible shyness.

You might also like: Edith Wharton’s Struggles with Self-Doubt

Tiptoeing into publishing

Like many authors, Edith started out by writing shorter pieces and poetry. Fast and Loose, a little-known novella, was published in 1877 when she was only fourteen; Verses, a collection of poems, was privately printed the following year. Her poems were first published nationally in Scribner’s Magazine, and in 1891, they published the first of many of her short stories.

She tiptoed into the publishing of books with The Decoration of Houses (1897). Another in this genre, Italian Villas and Their Gardens came a bit later (1904).

Her early literary reputation was built on small successes, as well as the welcome friendship and constructive critique of one who did believe in her talent, Walter Berry, a lifelong confident for whom she carried a torch (and whose grave in Paris is next to hers).

Wharton’s first collection of short stories was titled The Greater Inclination (1899). Its publication helped her to finally accept herself as a professional writer and not a dilettante. She vowed to turn away from the “distractions of a busy and sociable life, full of friends and travel and gardening for the discipline of the daily task.” As she wrote in her memoir, this is when she went from being “a drifting amateur in to a professional,” and most importantly, “gained what I lacked most—self confidence.”

The House of Mirth

Her first novel, The House of Mirth (1905), was an instant bestseller. Wharton exulted to her publisher Charles Scribner, “It is a very beautiful thought that 80,000 people should want to read The House of Mirth, and if the number should ascend to 100,000 I fear my pleasure would exceed the bounds of decency.”

How delighted she would be if the word reached her in the Great Beyond, that The House of Mirth is still in print, as is Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, as well many of her other titles.

Edith Wharton page on Amazon

Teddy Wharton and The Mount

In April of 1885, Edith Jones married Edward “Teddy” Robbins Wharton in New York City. Some years later, she designed and built The Mount, an imposing mansion with extensive grounds in Lenox, MA. She lived there with Teddy Wharton from 1902 to 1911. Due to his drinking and struggles with mental illness, theirs was an unhappy marriage. Upon the couple’s divorce in 1913, Wharton moved to France.

Wharton fans will love visiting The Mount

A move to France and refugee relief work

Edith became deeply involved in refugee relief work during World War I.  She wrote reports for American newspapers and organized the American Hostel for Refugees. Among her other accomplishments were employing skilled 90 women who had been thrown out of work; feeding and housing hundreds of child refugees from Belgium, establishing hostels for other refugees; and assisting wounded soldiers and struggling families.

For her war relief efforts, Wharton received one of France’s highest honors, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Belgium named her a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold.

Edith Wharton surrounded by World War I soldiers

Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, and later years

After the war, she continued her prodigious literary output and became part of a vaunted literary circle that included her close friend, Henry James.

The Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for fiction was awarded to Wharton for The Age of Innocence (1921), making her the first woman to achieve this distinction. Two years later she also became the first woman ever to receive an honorary doctorate (conferred upon her by Yale University). It was the last time she returned to the U.S.

Even at the height of her fame and literary prowess, Edith struggled with censorship. Ladies’ Home Journal criticized her story “The Day of the Funeral” as “too strong” for their readership. She once wrote:

“Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on piano-legs.”

Her remaining years were spent in France, where she died from a stroke at the age of seventy five in 1937.

More about Edith Wharton on this site

Edith Wharton Needed Approval, Just Like the Rest of Us
Edith Wharton’s Struggles with Self-Doubt
Edith Wharton’s Reflections on Her Writing Life
Visiting The Mount — Edith Wharton’s Home in Lenox, MA
Dear Literary Ladies: How should I deal with reviews of my work?
Edith Wharton’s Introduction to Ethan Frome
Perceptive Quotes by Edith Wharton
4 Noted Women Authors as World War I Nurses and Relief Workers
Edith Wharton’s obituary

Major Works

Edith Wharton wrote some forty works of fiction, including and numerous novellas and short stories in addition to longer novels. These are her best known.

The Greater Inclination  (1899)
The House of Mirth  (1905)
Ethan Frome   (1911)
The Reef  (1912)
The Custom of the Country  (1913)
The Age of Innocence   (1920)
The Buccaneers  (1938; posthumous)

Notable nonfiction

The Decoration of Houses  (1897)
Italian Villas and Their Gardens  (1904)
In Morocco  (1920)

Autobiography and Biographies

A Backward Glance  (1934) by Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton: A Biography by R.W.B. Lewis
Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge

More Information

Wikipedia
The Edith Wharton Society
Reader discussions of Wharton’s books on Goodreads

Articles, News, Etc.

What Would Edith Wharton Think of Our Modern Home Decor Tastes
A Visit to the Cemetery Where Edith Wharton Buried Her Beloved Dogs
12 Must-Read Collections of Famous Authors’ Letters
Handwritten Manuscript Pages From Classic Novels:

Edith Wharton’s manuscript from The House of Mirth
Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and a Case of Anxiety of Influence

Read and listen online

Wharton’s public domain works on Project Gutenberg
Audio recordings of Wharton’s public domain works on Librivox

Selected film adaptations of Edith Wharton’s works

The Age of Innocence (1943)
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Ethan Frome (1993)
The House of Mirth (2000)

Visit and research

The Mount  – Lenox, MA, USA
Edith Wharton Collection  – Beineke Library at Yale University, New Haven, CT
Edith Wharton gravesite in Versailles, France

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Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette)

Colette (January 28, 1873 – August 3, 1954) was a French author whose full original name was Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. She was as known for her writing and performing as she was for her scandalous lifestyle. As a child, her mother Sido was her greatest inspiration, and allowed the young Colette to drink deeply from the well of life to gain courage and individuality.

Her stories of strong females were often based on her own experiences, and were more sexually explicit than most fiction of their time. Colette was a practicing journalist in the midst of her writing career.

Strong females and honest sexuality

In 1900, Colette began publishing the series of Claudine stories that defined the teenage girl of the era, exploring her sexual and mischievous sides. The problem: Her first husband, Willy, took the credit as well as the earnings for these popular stories.

Willy, whose real name was Henry Gauthier-Villars, was much older than herself. The marriage was a disaster — not only did he compelled her to write the Claudine stories, but then published them under his name. Claudine at School (1900) was the first of them efforts to be published, and was an immediate success. More Claudine books followed.

Freed from the nefarious Willy

Once she divorced the nefarious Willy, Colette published Retreat from Love (1907), her first solo novel. Once she broke free of her first husband, her sprit soared. Colette worked as a journalist and moonlighted as a music hall performer, all the while continuing to write fiction. This was also the period in which she conducted a series of affairs with women. All the while, she kept the lessons she gleaned from her complicated possessive mother — to be resilient and independent.

Short and Sweet Quotes by Colette

More marriages, and a child

Colette had her first and only child, a daughter, at age forty. The girl was named Colette, but acquired the odd nickname Bel-Gazou. It has been said that Colette was an abominable, neglectful mother.

She married her daughter’s father, Henry de Jouvenel, a journalist and politician, with whom she was mismatched. The marriage failed quickly, but not before she seduced her 16-year-old stepson. She was then 47. It wasn’t until she was in her early 50s that she met her match. What started as a heated affair with Maurice Goudeket, who much younger than herself, became a lasting, sweet relationship characterized by mutual devotion.

A prolific life of letters

Colette’s love life was passionate and volatile, but nothing stopped her from a voluminous writing output. In both ways, she followed the footsteps of her fellow Frenchwoman, George Sand, whom she admired. It was the vagaries of love, its joys, complications, heartaches, and sensual pleasures, that gave her a bounty of material to work with.

Gigi, perhaps her best-known works (which inspired a popular film), is a story of a French girl training to be a courtesan, but who falls in love with a wealthy gentleman. Its stage adaptation, created by her American friend Anita Loos, was greeted with critical acclaim with then unknown Audrey Hepburn playing the main character. It was also made into a popular 1985 film with Leslie Caron in the title role.

Other masterpieces, in addition to the aforementioned Claudine books, include Chéri (which inspired the 2009 film starring Michelle Pfeiffer), The Vagabond (the author’s personal favorite), The Ripening Seed, and Mitsou. Sido was an homage to her mother.

Colette page on Amazon

Later years

Colette conducted her life with no regrets, and disdained the restraint society had on female, expression. In her later years, Colette suffered from arthritis and rarely left her Paris apartment. In 1948, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Memoir became a favored literary form as she reflected on her life as she grew older.

To say that Colette was prolific is an understatement to describe her vast output of novels, plays, stories. Less known is that she also produced film and radio scripts and even an opera libretto (L’enfant et les sortilèges by Maurice Ravel).

Upon her death in 1954, Colette was one of the world’s most renowned women of letters and was given a state funeral, the first for a woman in France.

See also: The Vagabond by Colette, her favorite among her novels

More about Colette on this site

Short and Sweet Quotes by Colette

Major works

Colette was incredibly prolific; this list represents her most widely translated and read novels, though produced numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction.

The Claudine stories (1900-1904)
The Vagabond   (1910)
Mitsou (1919)
Chéri (1920)
The Last of Chéri (1926)
Sido (1929)
The Other One   (1931 translation of La Seconde, 1929)
The Pure and The Impure   (1931)
Gigi  (1944)

Biographies 

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman (1999)
Earthly Paradise: An Autobiography (collected from Colette’s writings, 1975)
Colette: A Taste for Life by Yvonne Mitchell (1975)

More Information

Wikipedia
Obituary – The New York Times, 1954
Reader discussion of Colette’s books on Goodreads

Stage and film adaptations (selected)

Gigi (film, 1958)
Gigi (Broadway musical, 1973)
Duo (1990, French)
Cheri (film, 2009)

Visit Colette’s Home

Musée Colette – St.-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Burgundy, France

*This post contains affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, The Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Mary Ann Shadd Cary (October 9, 1823 – 1893) was best known for launching a newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, while living in Windsor, Ontario in Canada, becoming the first woman publisher of any race or background in Canada, and the first African-American woman publisher in all of North America.

As editor and writer for the Freeman, she advocated for the black community in Canada and beyond, working tirelessly to break down the dual barriers of race and gender. She was also an active participant in the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S., and lectured widely on education and self-reliance. Later in life, she became an attorney.

The Shadd family’s journey

The oldest of thirteen siblings, Mary Ann, was inspired by her parents, A.D. and Harriet Shadd. Both parents were deeply involved with the cause of abolition, and her father wrote for the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. The family’s home in Delaware was a stop on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves make their way to Northern states and Canada.

In 1840, the Shadds moved their thirteen children from Delaware, where they’d always lived, to Pennsylvania. Delaware, a free state, made it illegal to educate African-American children, so there was no question of staying — education and abolition were the family’s guiding forces.

In Pennsylvania, Mary Ann attended one of the state’s many Quaker schools, and after training to be a teacher, opened a school for African-American children. Another jolt came when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Now, not only were runaway slaves in greater peril than ever, but free Northern blacks could also be captured and forced into bondage.

The Provincial Freeman

Mary Ann and her brother Isaac fled to Windsor, Canada, just across the border from Detroit. Once settled in Windsor, Mary Ann started another school, this time with integrated classrooms. She also launched The Provincial Freeman. Isaac managed the newspaper’s business affairs, and Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward, a fugitive slave, was her co-editor. Not long after, the rest of the Shadd family joined Mary Ann and Isaac in Windsor. 

The Provincial Freeman was published from 1853 to1861, becoming one of North America’s rare black-owned newspapers. It promoted integration and equality, and featured news stories about culture, education, and politics — many of which Mary Ann wrote or edited.

As founder and co-editor of The Provincial Freeman, she once wrote of herself that she “broke editorial ice,” expressing her sense that she’d cracked a glass ceiling. The paper primarily served the 35,000 black residents of Ontario, but it was also read in many parts of the U.S., where educated blacks were eager to see their lives and views reflected in print. Mary Ann traveled back and forth from the U.S. often, gathering stories for the newspaper. She also lectured on self-reliance and education, and encouraged African-American families to emigrate to Canada.

During the years when she was running the newspaper, she married Thomas Cary, a Canadian widower with three children, and they had two more of their own. Sadly, her husband died in 1860, just a few years into the marriage.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary Statue at BME Freedom Park, Chatham, Ontario

Return to the U.S., becoming an attorney

After publishing what would become the paper’s last issue in 1861, Mary Ann returned to live in the U.S. As the Civil War was breaking out, she felt called to help in the war effort. As a recruiting officer for the Union Army, her mission was to encourage African-American men to enlist in the battle against the Confederacy for the fight to end slavery.

After the war, Mary Ann delved into another new challenge — to study law at Howard University. There was just one problem — the historically black school didn’t allow women into their law school. Mary Ann filed a sex discrimination suit and won. It took many years of study, but at the age of sixty, she got her law degree. Becoming the second black woman attorney in the U.S., she spent the last ten years of her life practicing law.

There didn’t seem to be a moment’s rest for Mary Ann Shadd Cary, encapsulated by her best-known quote, “It is better to wear out than to rust out.” In the post-war years, she taught school and also was deeply involved in women’s suffrage, working with Susan B. Anthony and others in the movement. She died in 1893, at the age of 70.

Photo: Ontario’s Historical Plaques

More information about Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Wikipedia
Mary Ann Shadd Cary on Biography.com
National Women’s Hall of Fame
Civil War Women

Biographies

A Plea for Emigration by Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1852)
Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest

in the Nineteenth Century  by Jane Rhodes

Visit

The Mary Ann Shadd Cary House , where she lived for some time in Washington, D.C. is located at 1421 W Street, though it isn’t open to the public.
The statue bust honoring Mary Ann Shadd Cary is located in BME Freedom Par k in Chatham, Ontario, where she lived and from where the Provincial Freeman was published for part of its run.

*This post contains affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, The Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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