By compiling stories about the accomplishments of women, Christine set out to build an allegorical city where women and their achievements would be safe from sexist insults and slander.
Betty Smith’s novel sold millions of copies in the 1940s.
Weegee/International Center of Photography via Getty Images
No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation. But Smith rarely saw her hometown through rose-colored glasses − and even grew to resent it.
Writer Ursula Parrott, pictured with her son, Marc, in 1935.
ACME Newspapers
‘Ex-Wife’ originally outsold ‘The Great Gatsby,’ but critics sniffed at the novel, deeming it a melodramatic period piece − even though it tackled timeless issues like gender, money and power.
Illustration of explorer Isabella Bird’s first walk through Perak (Malaysia), from her book ‘The Golden Chersonese and the way thither’.
Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons
In the 19th century, several English women wrote accounts of their world travels. While considered by some as second-rate travellers, they were just as restless as their male contemporaries.
Detail from the cover of the children’s book Kayo’s House by Ugandan author Barbara Kimenye.
Macmillan/Mactracks Series
A new book illuminates the bold lives of Australian women journalists between 1860 and the end of Word War II – a time when female reporters were ‘almost unheard of’.
‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ didn’t begin life as a song, but being set to music helped it find fame.
starryvoyage/iStock via Getty Images Plus
This separation or segregation of women’s writing should be understood as part of the patriarchal control of what and who matters – and, historically, women have not.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction has just published 25 literary works by female authors with their real names for the first time. Could we do the same for Miles Franklin and Henry Handel Richardson here?
A portrait of George Eliot at 30 by Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade. Her masterpiece Middlemarch is often claimed to be the greatest novel in the English language.
Wikimedia Commons
Henry James called her a ‘great, horse-faced bluestocking’. On the 200th anniversary of her birth, we celebrate George Eliot, a literary trailblazer with an endless appetite for ideas, living in a patriarchal time.
Lady Reading in an Interior (between 1795 and 1800).
Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837)
Anna McGahan as Charmian Clift in Sue Smith’s play Hydra. Long overshadowed by her husband George Johnston, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Clift’s life and work.
Jeff Busby/Queensland Theatre
Fifty years after her death, Australian writer Charmian Clift is experiencing a renaissance. With her forward-thinking columns, Clift’s voice rose above the crowd during post-war Australia.
A photograph of Ellen N. La Motte soon after completing ‘The Backwash of War’ in 1916.
Courtesy of the National Archives, College Park, Maryland
Ellen N. La Motte’s ‘The Backwash of War’ was praised for its clear-eyed portrayal of war, but was swiftly banned. Yet the similarities between her spare prose and Hemingway’s are unmistakable.
Colette, photographed by Henri Manuel.
Wikimedia Commons