The Heart of the Trouble
Emma Garman considers the novels of Gwendoline Riley, a rare talent who shows no signs of slowing down.
Emma Garman considers the novels of Gwendoline Riley, a rare talent who shows no signs of slowing down.
Tennant wrote letters, painted pictures, and worked on a novel, never to be completed. His most significant published work was his 1949 foreword to his friend Willa Cather’s essay collection.
Coeditors of ‘The Little Review,’ the two women were as passionate about art as they were about each other.
Tennant wrote letters, painted pictures, and worked on a novel, never to be completed. His most significant published work was his 1949 foreword to his friend Willa Cather’s essay collection.
With life as we know it splintering and dislocating before our eyes, I found myself submitting utterly to the novel’s uncanny, déjà vu–steeped spell.
Lucy Ellmann’s perennial and revolutionary subtext is that women should enjoy pleasure.
At the Omega Workshops at the turn of the century, the distinction between fine and applied arts was dismissed.
Aesthetically and politically, Sandel’s novels count as feminist classics, with her heroine at the era’s literary vanguard alongside Clarissa Dalloway, Dorothy Richardson’s Miriam, and Djuna Barnes’s Robin Vote.
She was treated as a delightful novelty: a pretty, soft-voiced blonde with a doctorate in Heidegger’s existentialism
The life and career of Catherine Carswell was marked by such alarming and recurrent notoriety that her present obscurity is baffling.
Bâ, who published her debut novel at age fifty, became one of the first black African women to achieve international renown as an author.
The year before she died in Auschwitz at age twenty-nine, Etty Hillesum wrote: “I have the feeling that my life is not yet finished."
The lesbian author of a radically anti-colonialist precursor to Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" was only just barely rescued from complete obscurity
Known in France as "l'Androgyne du Desert," Eberhardt traveled North Africa at the turn of the century, dressed as a man. Her wild life transformed her into a legend.
Her work was too challenging, too morally ambiguous—in a word, too dark—to sit comfortably with popular notions of a woman writer, especially one from the uncultured colonies down under.
We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday!In the spring of 1923, the young married artists Jean and Valentine Hugo began inviting people to séances at their Paris apartment. A new m…
Whether deliberately or otherwise, Kavan did little to assist future biographers. Elusive and capricious, with the restless, questing nature of the malcontent, she drifted from country to country and man to man, formed friendships and dropped them, concealed her real age, and destroyed diaries and letters.
Markandaya's debut novel, set in India, was an international best seller. But when she turned her attention to England, and to its disenchantments, her name gradually faded from literary prominence.
You may know the love story of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. But do you know the love triangle? Violet Trefusis's tragicomic novels responded directly to her portrayal in Orlando.
Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Solitude seeks fulfillment in my tears and awaits me in the depths of every mirror and closes the windows carefully so the sky w…
Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. In the summer of 1956, Violette Leduc, the autofiction pioneer and protegée of Simone de Beauvoir, began inpatient psychiatric treatment. …
Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. The career of the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West featured one of the most remarkable second acts in literary history. Almos…
Our new monthly column, Feminize Your Canon, explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. The British novelist Olivia Manning spent her dogged, embittered career longing, largely in vain, for literary glory and a se…
In the spring of 1923, the young married artists Jean and Valentine Hugo began inviting people to séances at their Paris apartment. A new mood of occultism, influenced by Freud and the early Surrealists, was in the air. And raising the dead was…
The British novelist Anita Brookner, who died last year at age eighty-seven, suffered from the most misleading of literary reputations. Over the course of several decades and an astonishing twenty-four novels, including the Booker Prize–winning …
In 1926, when British publishers Chatto & Windus accepted Rosamond Lehmann’s first novel, Dusty Answer, they had modest hopes of its success. Young authors and tales of youthful experience dominated the market at the time, a craze sparked …
On Pre-Raphaelite muse Jane Morris.“Defining British Art,” part of this summer’s 250th anniversary sale at London auctioneer Christie’s, included two lots by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Ligeia Siren (1873), a nude of an unknown model, and Portrait of Jan…