Cover of Women Who Wrote

Women Who Wrote

by Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Gertrude Stein, Phillis Wheatley

352 pages2024HarperCollins FocusISBN 9781400341832
American literature

About this book

This beautiful, giftable collection celebrates both the wisdom and tenacity of courageous women who defied society's expectations and gifted the world with literary treasures through unparalleled fiction and poetry. We know many of their names--Austen and Alcott, Brontë and Browning, Wheatley, and Woolf--though some may be less familiar. They are here, waiting to introduce themselves. They wrote against all odds. Some wrote defiantly; some wrote desperately. Some wrote while trapped within the confines of status and wealth. Some wrote hand-to-mouth in abject poverty. Some wrote trapped in a room of their father's house, and some went in search of a room of their own. They had lovers and families. They were sometimes lonely. Many wrote anonymously or under a pseudonym for a world not yet ready for their genius and talent. The Women Who Wrote softcover edition offers: Stories from Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Willa Cather, Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, and Virginia Woolf. Poems from Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dorothy Parker, and Phillis Wheatley. These women wrote to change the world. They marched through the world one by one or in small sisterhoods, speaking to one another and to us over distances of place and time. Pushing back against the boundaries meant to keep us in our place, they carved enough space for themselves to write. They made space for us to follow. Here they are gathered together, an army of women who wrote an arsenal of words to inspire us. They walk with us as we forge our own paths forward.

Publication Details

Publisher
HarperCollins Focus
Published
2024
Pages
352
ISBN
9781400341832
Language
en

About Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. She and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth, and May, were educated by their father, philosopher and teacher Bronson Alcott, and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May. Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau, and theatricals in the barn at "Hillside". Like her character, "Jo March" in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy. "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, "and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences ..." For Louisa, writing was an early passion. She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays --"the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens." At age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed: "I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write -- anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!"

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