August 17, 2023

I was an English major in college, graduated in 1970. For the most part the classes offered were well-taught and prepared me to for my life as a reader and as a high school English teacher. However, there was a major hole in the curriculum. No female writers.

Oh, maybe we read a few poems by Emily Dickinson or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but in the American Novel class, during which we read and wrote a paper about a different book every week. We read Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne and even Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, but no Willa Cather or Edith Wharton. In none of my classes was I introduced to George Eliot or Virginia Woolf. I do remember reading Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in high school, but if I recall, it was not assigned. I chose to read it for an independent study.

After that steady diet of male authors, I decided during my years of young motherhood to read books mainly by women. I wish I still had my book lists from those years, but they are long gone. I do remember feeling I had been deprived of women’s voices for far too long, and I gobbled up book after book, broadening my own perspective and education.

As I started reading A Life of One’s Own, Nine Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs, I felt myself drawn into the world of women writers again; women who paved the way for women writers today.

Each chapter of A Life of One’s Own, which is a play on Virginia Woolf’s treatise, A Room of One’s Own, focuses on an important female writer: Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. Joanna Biggs, newly divorced, turns to these writers, these women, and their books, for clues about how to live fully a life of freedom and intellectual fulfillment as a woman. The resulting book is a combination of memoir, literary criticism, and biography.

True confessions: I have not read Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women nor have I read deBeauvoir’s The Second Sex nor do I intend to do so at this stage of my life. I do feel more of a gap, knowing I have not read Eliot’s Middlemarch, and perhaps the next time I am allowed to take only one book with me for a week of confinement in a remote cabin, this will be the book. I do want to read it, but that means not reading a pile of other books. Another confession: I have only read the first book, My Brilliant Friend, in Elena Ferrante’s quartet, and it just didn’t grab me. Women friends who know me have expressed surprise that I didn’t love it, so what did I miss? This past weekend my husband and I stopped in a sweet little used bookstore when we were roaming, and I practically tripped over My Brilliant Friend. I took it as a sign, bought it, and added it to my TBR pile for another go. I will let you know.

I have read books by the other authors: The Bell Jar by Plath and some of her poetry; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston, which I re-read in 2021; several books, The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved by Morrison; and a number of Virginia Woolf books. In fact, I just read Monday or Tuesday, a slim volume of short stories or are they essays? The genre is not always clear and doesn’t need to be. My favorite in this book is “A Society,” about a group of women who created a “society for asking questions.”

One of us was to visit a man-of-war, another was to hide herself in a scholar’s study, another was to attend a meeting of business men; while all were to read books, look at pictures, go to concerts, keep our eyes open in the street, and ask questions perpetually. We were very young. You can judge of our simplicity when I tell you that before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books. Our questions were to be directed to finding out how far these objects were now attained by men. We vowed solemnly that we would not bear a single child until we were satisfied.

p. 39-40

Decades ago I worked in an independent bookstore and I remember when three volumes of Woolf’s arrived —Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own, and To The Lighthouse. By then I had read each of these books, but I had to own these lavender hardcover editions, each in their own slipcase. They never made it to the store’s bookshelves and remain treasures today in my personal library.

I was particularly taken by the chapter on Toni Morrison. Biggs says Morrison started writing “because she wanted something to read. What she wanted to read didn’t exist yet, so she wrote it.” I wonder if that isn’t true for each of the women writers profiled in Biggs’ book.

I also love this Morrison quote.

A grown-up–which I think is a good thing to be–is a person who does what she has to do without complaining, without pretending that it’s some enormous, heroic enterprise.”

p. 213

All in all, this was a pleasant read, a reminder of the gifts and legacy of women writers. I wish Biggs had written a final chapter focusing more on what she learned and discovered about herself as a woman, as a woman who writes. In addition, the subtitle of the book, Nine Women Writers Begin Again, doesn’t seem accurate. These women found ways to write, no matter what. They continued to write, rather than stopping and then beginning once again. And I am always intrigued by cover art. While this is a lovely painting called 2nd Street View by Lois Dodd, it didn’t feel evocative of the book’s theme and topics. I know–picky, picky, picky!

An Invitation

Are there any female writers who wrote in the past who you are just now discovering? I would love to know.