Overview
From Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison and Lorrie Moore, this wide-ranging collection features the most brilliant fiction, poetry, memoir, letters, and essays by women writers with a pitch-perfect ear and a rich understanding of the unique female perspective. Writers included:
Julian of Norwich • Anne Bradstreet • Aphra Behn Lady Mary Wortley Montagu • Mary Wollstonecraft • Jane Austen Mary Shelley • Margaret Fuller • Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet A. Jacobs • George Eliot • Frances E. W. Harper Emily Dickinson • Louisa May Alcott • Sarah Orne Jewett Edith Wharton • Willa Cather • Virginia Woolf • Marianne Moore Katherine Mansfield • Zora Neale Hurston • Lorrie Moore Stevie Smith • Kathleen Raine • Elizabeth Bishop Mary Lavin • Tillie Olsen • Muriel Rukeyser • Maeve Brennan Muriel Spark • Grace Paley • Marie Ponsot • Nadine Gordimer Denise Levertov • Flannery O'Conner • Maya Angelou Cynthia Ozick • Adrienne Rich • Toni Morrison • Alice Munro Edna O'Brien • Mary Oliver • Lucille Clifton • June Jordan Marge Piercy • Sharon Olds • Alice Walker • Leslie Marmon Silko Rita Dove • Sandra Cisneros • Edna St. Vincent Millay
Editorials
KLIATT
From Anne Bradstreet (b. 1612) to Andrea Lee (b. 1960), this collection includes the work of some 50 women who have written in English over four centuries. In selecting prose and poetry, treatises and short stories, letters and journal extracts, Susan Cahill has tried to choose pieces that reflect each writer's world, her insights, her vision. Thus Lady Montagu (b. 1689) tells her husband, "I think you use me very unkindly" while a child in "Christmas Night 1962" by Joyce Carol Oates "was sent flying across the room hitting the door frame banging its head crack!" In the poetry of Margaret Cavendish (b.1623), Mirth says, "I dwell in groves that gilt are with the sun" and the Pueblo woman in a story by Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948) sings in a lullaby, "The earth is your mother, she holds you." Across continents and across centuries, the reader can delight in the words of these women. Some of the extracts are quite brief—a poem or two from Frances Harper, Marianne Moore, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy. Some are longer—short stories by Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Conner, an essay by Zora Neale Hurston. If read piecemeal for an individual author and her work, this compilation is handy, but hardly unique. If read in its entirety as a sampling of women's writing over a span of centuries, it is revelatory in breadth and depth of accomplishment. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2004, Penguin, New American Library, 314p., Ages 15 to adult.—Patricia Moore