In Miranda Darling’s feminist fiction, Mrs Dalloway is a Sydney wife and mother who refuses to be tamed, despite her husband’s attempts at coercive control.
When Jane Gleeson-White’s marriage ended two years after her mother died, she lost her voice. Books by women writers like Rachel Cusk, Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson helped her find it again.
A Sydney librarian recently discovered a misfiled lost gem in the stacks: Virginia Woolf’s own copy of her first novel, with handwritten notes for revision. An expert explores what they tell us.
‘Literary couples are a plague,’ wrote Elsa Morante, married to Alberto Moravia. They’re one of the couples in this lively exploration of what happens when two writers share loves and lives.
Edwina Preston reflects on the lost art of hanging out – which feeds creativity – and the need to reclaim time from the pressures of productivity. She draws on new books by Jenny Odell and Sheila Liming.
Edwina Preston pays tribute to the humble letter: from literary love letters to philosophical lessons to cherished family heirlooms. Letters impart lessons, reveal character – and are a form of art.
Sophie Cunningham’s novel about Leonard Woolf and the contemporary writer attempting to tell his story is wry and earnest – and yes, devastating when it needs to be.
Selby Wynn Schwartz’s inventive, poetic reimagining of lives like those of Virginia Woolf and Sarah Bernhardt – against a backdrop of Sappho – has just been longlisted for the Booker Prize.
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.
Virginia Woolf’s satire of readers who use easily accessible art to acquire class and culture might just reveal why certain films win awards like Oscars.
Writers like Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle and J.M. Barrie suffered personal loss during the First World War. Their grief and insight helped readers with their own post-war collective grief.