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Chapter One

First Ladies of Literature

Mothers of Invention

Hats and pen caps off to these pioneers who paved the way for every woman who followed in their courageous footsteps. Here are stories of their struggles, unmitigated moxie, and unbridled determination to express themselves and share their views with readers. No fainthearts, these women survived jailing, name-calling, and, cruelest of all, having their reputations and accomplishments hidden for decades and even centuries. In addition to the women profiled here, let’s also salute Lady Murasaki Shikubu, the first novelist of any gender, whose novel, The Tale of Genji, depicted court life, love, and adventure in eleventh-century Japan.

The literary laureates are rousing as well, slowly but surely knocking down barriers and opening minds in their wake—and, in this category, let us not forget to acknowledge brilliant Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman “immortal,” who in 1980 was elected to the French Academy by secret ballot over the objections of one member who memorably claimed, “The Academie has survived over three hundred years without women, and it could survive another three hundred without them.” Aphra Behn, Charles II’s spy, dared to write for a living and expected to be paid for it. (Her work also went unacknowledged for three hundred years as a precursor to the novel.) From Saint Jerome’s uncredited nuns who really “wrote” the Bible to poet-slave Phyllis Wheatley, these first ladies of literature deserve credit for showing us that real inspiration can come only from being true to yourself at any cost.

ENHEDUANNA sacred poet of Sumeria

Any discussion of breakthrough writers must surely begin with Enheduanna, the first recorded writer of either gender. Born into the royal family of Sumeria in the area that in the modern world is known as southern Iraq, she served as high priestess to the moon god and goddess, Nanna and Inanna. Her poem-hymns were written in cuneiform on clay tablets, and they escaped the fate many other documents of the time suffered: disintegrating into forgotten dust. Her portrait, carved on a limestone disc, was discovered in an excavation of the ancient city of Ur.

Her greatest work is the “Hymn to Inanna.” It is difficult to know whether she employed poetic license when she describes being sent into exile during a time of political upheaval. Readers can’t help but notice that the poem “Nin-me-sar-ra” describes how Enheduanna’s prayers to the moon god Nanna went unanswered and how Nanna’s daughter, the moon goddess Inanna, came to her aid, exacting justice and restoring her to her rightful place as priestess. More than four thousand years old, the poem is simple, powerful, and beautiful.

Let it be known! That this is not said of Nanna, it is said of you—his is your greatness. You alone are the High one.

Enheduanna

THE MUSES the nine Greek goddesses of the arts who inspire artists

Calliope, the “Fair Voiced,” is the eldest of Muses and presides over epic poetry.

Clio, the “Proclaimer” and the muse of history, carries a scroll of knowledge.

Erato the “Lovely,” with her lyre, rules over love poetry and mimicry.

Euterpe, the “Giver of Pleasure,” plays a flute. Her domain is music.

Melpomene, the “Songstress,” wears the mask of tragedy, over which she presides.

Polyhymnia is “she of many hymns.” Wearing a veil, she is the muse of sacred poetry.

Terpsichore, “the Whirler,” has the domain of dance.

Thalia, “the Flourishing,” wears the mask of comedy and is the muse of both comedy and idyllic poetry.

Urania, “the Heavenly,” is the astronomer’s muse; she wears a crown of stars and foretells the future through astrology.

The Three Fates determine all our destinies: Clotho spins the thread of life, Lachesis chooses the length and outcome, and Atropos cuts the thread of life.

MARGERY KEMPE medieval autobiographer

Margery Kempe herself is the best source of information on her life, having written her autobiography—the first of its kind in English—in the fourteenth century. Born in 1373, she was the daughter of the mayor of the town of Lynn in Norfolk, England. She married late for the times—at twenty—and got pregnant right away. While undergoing a wretchedly long and painful labor, she went mad and became violent, tearing at her own flesh, shrieking, having visions of devils, and screaming obscenities about her husband, her neighbors and friends, and herself. She claimed to be calmed down when Christ himself appeared to her in a vision, and indeed, she returned to her life as a wife and mother and bore thirteen more children.

Margery Kempe was profoundly changed, however, by her vision and decided to dedicate her life to Christian mysticism, as she continued to experience visitations and fits of weeping. She undertook a journey to the Holy Land, traveling alone from England across the continent to the Middle East. Her religious intentions meant nothing to those she met along the way; she was treated horribly and was called a whore and a heretic. She was jailed for her efforts and forced to defend herself with no help. Her recollections of the time depict a woman heeding a calling, torn between her love of Christ and her love for her family.

Despite all her tribulations, she managed to live a long life. Unable to write herself, she worked with hesitant scribes to compose her life story. Called The Book of Margery Kempe, this literary treasure was lost for nearly five hundred years. Thankfully, a copy was rediscovered in 1934, and Britain’s first autobiographical text is again telling the story of this extraordinary, ordinary housewife and mother.

And sometimes those that men think were revelations are deceit and illusions, and therefore it is not expedient to give readily credence to every stirring.

Margery Kempe

APHRA BEHN living by the pen

It is amazing that the name of Aphra Behn, England’s first professional woman writer, is not better known. While a handful of her contemporaries—Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchilea, and Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle—wrote for the entertainment of a small circle of friends, Aphra Behn was paid for her work and undertook it as her profession. Her circumstances were far different from those of such courtly ladies, as well. She was a widow of modest means and used her talent to survive.

Behn’s parentage is unclear. We know she was born in 1640 and traveled with her foster family to Surinam in the West Indies. Some biographers say she was involved in a slave rebellion in 1663. That same year, she and her family and fellow travelers were the first Europeans to visit a tribe of Indians in the West Indies. The following year, she returned to England and married a London merchant, Johan Behn, who died of the plague in 1665.

After the tragedy of her short-lived marriage, Aphra Behn needed an income and was fortunate to have an opportunity to enter King Charles II’s private force of spies. “Such public toils of state affairs [were] unusual with my sex or in my years,” she admitted. Behn was sent to Antwerp, where she proved to be a most able spy, but she did not receive her promised payment and was sent to a London debtor’s prison in 1668. While in jail, she determined never again to subject herself to anyone’s mercy and vowed to make her way independently and by her own wits.

She wrote her first play and saw it published partly because of the sheer novelty that she was a woman. The play, The Forced Marriage, was staged in London in 1670. From then on, Behn’s progress was rapid. Her career as a professional playwright established, she wrote and published fourteen plays encompassing many styles from farce to drama, including The Rover, Sir Patient Fancy, The City Heiress, and The Roundheads. She also began publishing poetry and comic verse. Always skirting the edge of controversy, she wrote some very sensual poems which shocked the readers of the day and prompted Anne Finch to comment, “a little too loosely she writ.” Criticism of her work fell consistently into one of two extremes of either wild praise or scorching criticism and often focused on her femaleness: the “body of a Venus and the mind of a Minerva,” the “English Sappho,” or cruelly, “that lewd harlot.”

Behn’s response was to carry on, pointing out that the great male writers of the day suffered no public shame for their openly erotic references. When the London theater fell on hard times after the glories of the Restoration, Behn turned her hand to writing prose fiction: Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, published in 1684, followed by The Fair, Jilt, Agnes de Castro, and her opus, Oroonoko. Written in 1688, Oroonoko was loosely autobiographical, a retelling in a fictionalized version of her journey to Surinam as a young woman and her protest against slavery. This account is widely regarded as the first novel in English literature.

Sadly, a mere year after her triumph, she passed away, ill and impoverished. She continued to suffer denigration after her death by many who disapproved of her fiercely independent spirit. But Behn blazed the trail for every woman writer to come after her. Three hundred years later, Virginia Woolf penned this homage: “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

I’ll only say as I have touched before, that plays have no great room for that which is men’s great advantage over women.

Aphra Behn

LADY MARY CHUDLEIGH

A contemporary of Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Chudleigh wrote a verse response to British minister John Sprint, who in 1700 wrote The Bride-Woman’s Counselor, which instructed women to love, honor, and obey in no uncertain terms. Chudleigh wrote, in verse, a series including The Female Advocate; or A Plea for Just Liberty of the Tender Sex and notably Married Women and the Ladies Defense; or the Bride-Woman’s Counselor Answered. John Sprint was indeed resoundingly answered with Chudleigh’s beautifully wrought feminist rhetoric scorning the tacit rules that kept women “Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools, And with the utmost industry bred fools,” entrapped in the “mean, low, trivial cares of life.” She exhorted women to “read and think, and think and read again.” Sadly, we know very little of her life except that she married Sir George Chudleigh and lost her children at very young ages. Her poems were crafted skillfully and with a keen intelligence and courageous idealism. Writing in 1700 and 1701, Lady Mary was well ahead of her time.

Wife and servant are the same, But only differ in the name.

Lady Mary Chudleigh, To the Ladies

CHRISTINE DE PISAN the first woman writer to be published in English

In the same way that, according to Virginia Woolf, English women writers are indebted to Aphra Behn, Italian women writers, including Nobel laureate Grazia Deledda, are indebted to Christine de Pisan. Three hundred years before Aphra Behn set pen to paper, de Pisan was earning her way as a writer.

Born in 1364, she was the daughter of a scientist and scholar, Thomas de Pisan, a Venetian court-appointed astrologer to the French king Charles V. Her girlhood saw a rare advantage for Christine: a classical education. She loved France and claimed it as her heart’s home. Her father saw to it that she was educated as well as any man, and Christine learned French, Latin, arithmetic, and geometry. She married Etienne du Castel, who was nine years her senior, at fifteen. In three short years they had three children, and du Castel died around the time of the third baby’s birth. At barely nineteen, Christine de Pisan was left to support her children and several hapless relatives, and did so with her talent for prose and poetry.

She claimed to write constantly, noting “in the short space of six years, between 1397 and 1403…fifteen important books, without mentioning minor essays, which, compiled, make seventy large copy-books.” Among her books are a biography of Charles V, another on Philip of Burgundy, and Le Livre de Paix. In the latter, an instruction on rearing princes and a rebuttal to the bestselling “bible of courtly love,” The Romance of the Rose, de Pisan sought to repair a woman’s reputation that had been ruined by the popular epic poem.

After a writing career that lasted twenty-nine years, Christine retired to a convent. In 1429, just before her death, she wrote a book honoring Joan of Arc. It was, wrote Vicki León in Uppity Women of Medieval Times, “the only French book ever written about the Maid of Orleans in her lifetime.”

While she was alive, Christine de Pisan received unstintingly positive reviews for her work and was compared favorably to Cicero and Cato. Her work stands the test of time. In 1521, Le Livre du duc des vraies aman was published in England as The Book of the Duke of True Lovers, the first book by a woman published in English. Her City of Women was rediscovered in the twentieth century and is taught in literature courses worldwide.

ANNE BRADSTREET Pilgrim’s Progress

Fifty years before Aphra Behn shocked English society, Anne Bradstreet wrote the first book of poetry published in the American colonies. Upon arriving with her family in 1630, Anne Bradstreet saw the raw new America as an opportunity to create a new way of being: “I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose,” she wrote.

She was at once a pioneer and a typically religious member of her Puritan community. She had come from a privileged background afforded her by her father, Thomas Dudley, who ran the estate of an earl of Lincoln. Anne Bradstreet was allowed to visit the earl’s library freely, and she took full advantage, reading religious texts, poetry, and classics exhaustively.

In 1628, she married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge who worked as a steward for the earl. Anne’s husband was nine years older than she and equally educated. Life on the earl’s estate was filled with ease, comfort, and security, but that soon changed. The devout religiosity of the Dudleys led them to believe they should prove their devotion to God through trials and tribulations. These they found in plentitude in the New World. The whole family moved lock, stock, and barrel to the Massachusetts colony, where Anne’s father and husband both served as governors. They suffered from the cold, malaria, starvation, and the harsh, unforgiving climate of this savage new world.

Part of the Puritan ethos included stringent second-class status for all women, for it was God’s will that a woman should be subordinate, a constant helpmate to man, and humble, with no personal ambitions. In these circumstances, writing was dangerous. In 1645, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop lamented the sad straying of “a godly young woman” who was mentally unstable and who in a weakened, fallen state, gave “herself wholly to reading and writing, and [had] written many books.” He had banished Anne Hutchinson seven years earlier for daring to interpret religious doctrine in her own way.

But Anne Bradstreet’s brother-in-law John Woodbridge didn’t hold to the belief that women couldn’t have their own intellectual lives. He had Anne Bradstreet’s poetry, collected in The Tenth Muse, printed in London, where it had proved to be highly “vendable,” according to London booksellers. Woodbridge provided a foreword to the book making clear that it was “the work of a woman, honoured and esteemed where she lives, for…the exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her family occasions, and these poems are but the fruit of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments.”

A devoted mother, Anne Bradstreet gave birth to eight children, and in her role as helpmate, she saw her husband rise to considerable prosperity and power in the colony. With little time to rest or write, her literary output ceased. She suffered from continuing symptoms of the smallpox she had contracted as a child and died in 1673.

Though she was forgotten for centuries, twentieth-century poets, particularly Conrad Aiken and John Berryman, have recognized her contribution in various tributes. Adrienne Rich demands her genius be honored: “To have written…the first good poems in America, while rearing eight children on the edge of the wilderness, was to have managed a poet’s range and extension within confines as severe as any American poet has confronted.”

Fool, I do grudge the Muses did not part

Twixt him and me that overfluent store….

From the Prologue, Anne Bradstreet

MARY MANLEY the first bestselling woman author

It is amazing that Mary Manley is not better known; she was the first British woman to have a career as a political journalist, the first female author of a bestseller, and the very first woman to be jailed for her writing. Born in 1663, she was ahead of her time in her advocacy for women’s rights and her willingness to take risks with her own comfortable life to fight for these rights. Manley decried the inequity that saw women punished for acts any man could freely engage in. Her greatest passion was that women should as writers have equal opportunity with men.

She herself was prolific, authoring short stories, plays, satires, political essays, and letters. She replaced Jonathan Swift of Gulliver’s Travels fame as the editor of the Tory paper, the Examiner, yet she remains relatively unknown, while he has a permanent place in the canon and is widely read and widely taught. Swift’s achievements seem Lilliputian in comparison to Mary Manley’s feat.

Her bestselling satire, Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes from the New Atlantis, an Island in the Mediterranean, was aimed at the opposition to the Tory party, the Whigs. The poison prose swiftly hit its target. Manley and her publishers were thrown in jail, and the adage about any kind of publicity—even bad publicity—being good held true. Readers bought the book in droves to figure out who the real people were behind the thinly veiled biographical sketches. Clever lass that she was, Manley’s absolutely public Secret Memoirs included much to titillate and tantalize, including Corinna, the maiden who staunchly refuses to get married, and a mysterious lesbian group called the Cabal.

As a challenge at the height of her fame, Mary Manley described herself as “a ruined woman,” and in a fictionalized autobiography revealed her betrayal and entrapment into marriage to a cousin who took her money and ran. Inspired by her father, a writer who held a high office, Mary wasn’t ruined at all, but was a huge success as a writer who chose lovers of standing as peers and lived life on her own terms. Before there was J.K., Danielle, or Nora, there was Mary! This seventeenth-century virago paved the way for Joe Klein’s bestselling political satire, Primary Colors, and for every female who ever mounted the bestseller list.

She who has all the muses in her head, wanted to be caressed in a poetical manner.

Mary Manley from Secret Memoirs

LUCY TERRY PRINCE pioneer and poet

As one of the first Black American poets, Lucy Terry has yet to receive her due. She was born in 1730 in Africa. After being kidnapped as a baby, she was brought to the colony of Rhode Island by slavers and was purchased at the age of five by Ensign Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts, to be a servant. Wells had Lucy baptized on June 15, 1735, at the insistence of his mistress, during the “Great Awakening,” an effort to root Calvinism in New England. As many Black people in America as possible were baptized in this mass conversion effort.

Little is known of her life until age sixteen, when she was inspired to poetry by the bloody massacre of two colonial families by sixty Indians in “the Bars”—a colonial word for “meadow”—an area outside Deerfield. George Sheldon, a Deerfield historian, declared Lucy’s ballad, “The Bars Fight,” to be “the first rhymed narration of an American slave” and believes it was recited and sung by Lucy. He further describes it as “the fullest contemporary account of that bloody tragedy which has been preserved.” While the original document has been lost, it was passed down in the oral tradition and printed for the first time by Josiah Gilbert Holland in 1855.

PHILLIS WHEATLEY the muse of Africa

While Lucy Terry Prince remains fairly obscure, Phillis Wheatley has been acknowledged for her role as one of the earliest women writers in America. She is, in fact, generally regarded as the first Black woman writer, and, after Anne Bradstreet, the second woman writer in America. A poet, her verse expresses guarded pride about her “sable race” and includes a subtle treatment of the subject of slavery, though her letters expressed her strong feelings about it. She called herself “Africa’s Muse” in her Hymn to Humanity.

Her story and Lucy’s began the same way: Phillis was kidnapped by slave traders in Africa as a child, and, along with as many as eighty other young girls, she was transported by ship from Senegal, brought to the port of Boston, and sold into slavery in 1761.

Phillis’ fortunes were a bit better than those of many others as she was purchased by a kind-hearted woman, Susannah Wheatley, who took pity on the forlorn child wrapped in a dirty scrap of carpeting. Phillis’s price was a bargain; the Wheatleys, guessing her to be around seven years old because of missing front teeth, took her into their home on King Street and gave her their last name, as was the practice with slaves.

The Wheatleys noticed how curious and alert Phillis was and judged her to be of exceptional intelligence. When she tried to write on the wall, their teenaged daughter, Mary Wheatley, started to teach Phillis in earnest. At the end of a year’s time, Phillis was reading and writing with ease and had also learned, according to her master’s recollection, a “little astronomy, some ancient and modern geography, a little ancient history, a fair knowledge of the Bible, and a thoroughly appreciative acquaintance with the most important Latin classics, especially the works of Virgil and Ovid.” Phillis became, again in his words, “one of the most highly educated young women in Boston,” and went on to study and translate Latin. Indeed, one of her interpretations of a Latin tale by Ovid was published.

She also liked to compose verse and loved the brilliantly crafted poetry of Alexander Pope, whom she took as her model. In 1767, fourteen-year-old Phillis wrote the first of many occasional poems, “To the University of Cambridge,” thirty-two blank verses of counsel for college boys. The Wheatleys proved to be generous to the girl and encouraged her to pursue her poetics, providing her with paper and pen in case of sudden inspiration. Phillis had a delicate constitution and was only allowed to perform light chores such as dusting and polishing.

One of her occasional poems, “On the Death of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield,” brought her to the eyes of the world when it appeared on a broadside printed in Boston in 1770, which was then reprinted throughout the colonies and in England. Her story was sensationalized as the work of “a servant girl…but nine years in this country from Africa.” She was ushered into literary and social circles she would normally have been forbidden to enter, though because of her slave status, she was not allowed to dine at her hosts’ tables.

In 1772, Phillis considered the prospects of collecting her poems into a volume, and the ever-supportive John Wheatley sent a manuscript and a letter of introduction and biographical information to Archibald Bell in London. Bell and the Countess of Huntingdon, to whom he had shown Phillis’s poems, doubted that an African girl had really written the work and required the testament of no fewer than eighteen prominent Bostonians.

Meanwhile, Phillis’s health weakened, and the Wheatleys reasoned that a trip abroad might bolster her. Accompanied by Nathaniel Wheatley, Mary’s twin, who was on a business trip, Phillis set out to London, where she was an immediate cause célèbre, thanks to an introduction into society provided by the Countess of Huntingdon. She was fèted and flattered in a land free from slavery. According to one account, “Thoughtful people praised her; titled people dined her; and the press extolled the name of Phillis Wheatley, the African poetess.” Her single published book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, came out in 1773 and was dedicated to none other than the countess. Complete with a portrait of Phillis holding a quill pen drawn by slave artist and poet Scipio Moorhead, it contained thirty-nine poems.

The following year, Susannah Wheatley, the only mother figure Phillis had known in the land of her captors, died. With the Revolutionary War impending, Phillis wrote a letter to General George Washington, who was impressed by the “elegant lines” of her missive and invited her to be received by him and his officers. When John Wheatley passed away, Phillis was set free.

She married a Boston grocer a month later, a handsome free black man who claimed to have worked as a lawyer and physician as well as merchant. His looks and talent are said to have led him to a degree of “arrogance” and “disdain” for work, which allegedly saw the newlyweds into poverty. Two of their three children died, and Phillis labored at a cheap boarding house to support herself and the remaining child. At thirty-one, she died, followed almost immediately in death by her child. They were buried together in a location that remains unknown. The last attention the “African poetess” received for her writing talent was for a poem she wrote about the death of her baby son, published in 1784 in the Boston magazine. This was one of several compositions from the last part of her life, all set to be published in honor of Benjamin Franklin, to whom she had dedicated the book. The manuscript disappeared along with all trace of Phillis Wheatley’s work as a mature poet.

Imagination! Who can sing thy force? Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?

Phillis Wheatley

HARRIET E. ADAMS WILSON provocateur

Like many other literary women, Harriet Wilson was also left out of history books. She was the first Black woman to publish a novel in English and the first Black person, male or female, to publish a novel in America.

Sadly, we know precious little about this author. Harriet E. Adams Wilson is believed to have been born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1807 or 1808 and trained in millinery as her trade; she was then deserted and left in poverty by her sailor husband, who impregnated her before the abandonment. Her son from this relationship, George Mason Wilson, died at age seven, a year after the publication of the one novel it is known that Wilson wrote.

Her groundbreaking work, Our Nig, a title deliberately chosen for its challenge and daring, was printed by George C. Rand and Avery of Boston. It is believed Wilson self-published Our Nig to prove a political point, as evidenced by the full title, Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in A Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There, with the author credit to “Our Nig.”

Our Nig was ignored by reviewers and readers and barely sold. Wilson’s work was in the dustbin of lost history until Henry Louis Gates, Jr., discovered it and reissued it in 1983. Gates observed that the provocative title probably contributed to the novel’s near oblivion. The plot, a marriage between a white woman and a Black man, would have alienated many readers.

Example rendered her words efficacious. Day by day there was a manifest change of deportment toward “Nig.”

Harriet E. Adams Wilson

SARA TEASDALE parting the shadows

Poet Sara Teasdale, known now for the evocative intensity of her language, was brought up in the truest Victorian tradition in the late 1880s in St. Louis, Missouri. She was pampered and protected, but like a hothouse flower starved for light, felt smothered by her parents’ watchful restrictions. Imaginative and sensitive, Sara found her only solace in writing. In 1907, when she was twenty-three, Reedy’s Mirror, a St. Louis weekly paper, published her work for the first time.

By age twenty-six, she was desperate to break free of the hampering bonds of dependency on her parents. The only way she could manage this was to marry. She didn’t find the prospects particularly appealing, but it seemed preferable to her stifling life at home.

Her hopes included a serious writing career, which she found incompatible with the role of wife and mother. When she discovered she was pregnant, she had an abortion and obtained a divorce, hoping for the independence she believed would foster her writing. This unfortunate series of events sent her into a depression and failing health. From that point on, she lived the secluded life of a semi-invalid.

Teasdale’s beautiful poetry, bespeaking the secrets of the human heart, created an international reputation, beginning with her early Love Songs. Subsequently, she channeled her painful struggles for freedom from oppressive Victorian mores in Flame and Shadow. She won the highly regarded Columbia University Poetry Society prize, and in 1917 won the Pulitzer Prize for Love Songs, earning her place in history as the first poet to receive this prestigious award. Ultimately, the delicate despair described in her poems won out, and Sara Teasdale committed suicide in 1933.

O, beauty, are you not enough? Why am I crying after love?

Sara Teasdale, “Spring Night”

PEARL BUCK pearl of great price

Pearl Buck was born in West Virginia in 1892 to the Sydenstricker family, deeply religious people who dedicated their lives to missionary work. They chose to spread the word of Christianity in China, and Pearl spent a good portion of her girlhood there. She attended Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia, but after she graduated hurried back to Asia with her teaching certificate.

She made her living as a teacher until she married John Buck, a fellow American and an agriculturist. They married in 1917 and lived in northern China among the peasants. The Bucks had one child, born mentally handicapped, and adopted another child during Pearl’s tenure at the University of Nanking. In 1922, she started writing during the long hours she spent caring for her ailing mother. Her very first story was published in Asia magazine three years later. Pearl Buck returned to the United States to seek proper care for her daughter and studied for her master’s degree at Cornell. Later, she taught at three different universities in China until anti-foreigner sentiments became unavoidable. While fleeing violence in 1927, Pearl lost the manuscript for her first novel. Still, she continued, publishing East Wind: West Wind in 1930, followed the next year by The Good Earth.

The Good Earth was a global phenomenon from the beginning; in 1932, it won the Pulitzer Prize. A stage play was also written, as well as a script for the Academy Award-winning film. Pearl Buck was a huge success and saw her book translated into dozens of languages and selling millions of copies. In 1935, she left her adopted country, divorced her husband, and returned to the United States. Soon after, she married her publisher, Richard J. Walsh, but that didn’t stop her writing. While her success was generally more popular than critical, that all changed in 1938 when she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize. Buck was an amazingly prolific writer who once wrote five books in one year, penning more than eighty-five books in all. Her work includes plays, biographies, books for children, translations, and an autobiography as well as novels. She continued to write novels and articles through her entire life.

During the McCarthy years, she came under suspicion and was forced to write under the pseudonym John Sedges, but she never wavered in her essential beliefs of tolerance and understanding. She founded the East and West Association and was the president of the Author’s Guild, a free speech organization founded in the 1950s. She also created an organization to care for orphaned children of Asian mothers and American fathers and adopted six such orphans herself. A champion of women’s rights and rights for the mentally handicapped, she died of lung cancer in 1973 in her home of Danby, Vermont. She was a fierce crusader for greater mutual understanding for the people of the world, and with her Nobel Prize in Literature, she opened a new chapter for women in literature.

(I want to) write for the people…

Pearl S. Buck, regarding her great novel The Good Earth

GWENDOLYN BROOKS poet of the Beat

Gwendolyn Brooks has the distinction of being the first Black person to receive the Pulitzer Prize (for Annie Allen in 1950). One of the most innovative poets in the literary landscape of America, she was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas. Her family moved when she was young to the more urban city of Chicago, which imparted a street-smart influence that still informs her work. Brooks wanted to bring poetry to the poor Black kids of the inner city, and she attracted them with rapid-fire, tightly wound iambic pentameter that predated rap. In later life, she took a more radical bent, hooking up with the revolutionary Black Beat writer LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) and with Don L. Lee, and jumped into the causes of African Americans with both feet. She became a tough and angry Black Power poet, penning verses grounded in classical style deconstructed through the lens of her newfound racial awareness and commitment to cause. Forty years after her prizewinning feat, her poetry is still raw, fresh, and commanding.

I want to clarify my language. I want these poems to be free. I want them to be direct without sacrificing the kind of music, the picture-making I’ve always been interested in.

Gwendolyn Brooks

GRAZIA DELEDDA songs of Sardinia

While Pearl Buck and The Good Earth are household names, the Italian novelist Grazia Deledda is much less familiar. But she received the Nobel Prize for Literature twelve years before Buck and was a powerful voice among her people.

Born in 1871 in Sardinia, Deledda was a country girl who had little exposure to formal education. She did have access to books, however, and read avidly. She came from a troubled clan and was seemingly the only family member to escape illness or criminality; thus she ended up bearing the brunt of household chores and responsibility. Still, she managed to write in her precious spare time.

She married in 1900, and with her new husband moved to Rome, where she sought a broader readership for her work. She soon received approval from the critics and began writing intently, striving for excellence, writing what she knew best—stories of the life and passions of the peasants of Sardinia: in her words, a place of “myths and legends.” Deledda was dedicated to her craft and produced a considerable body of work, including her favorite novel, Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind), the story of a dissolute family centered around the guilt of a servant, and La Madre (The Mother), about the turbulent relationship between a mother and her son. In addition to her novels and short stories, she produced one volume of poetry, Paesaggi sardi (Sardinian Landscapes), as well as a translation of Balzac and a nonfiction analysis of the customs of her native island.

She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1926, the first Italian woman to be so honored. She died ten years later of breast cancer, but not before the publication that year of La chiesa della solitudine (The Church of Solitude), a semiautobiographical novel about a woman who deals with her breast cancer diagnosis at the cusp of the twentieth century by keeping it a secret, with predictable human fallout; it was published in an English translation by E. Ann Matter in 2002. Her autobiography, Cosima, was published posthumously the next year.

LUTIE EUGENIA STERNS librarian extraordinary

In 1887, Lutie Sterns began teaching in the Milwaukee school system. She quickly became appalled at the paucity of books for her students and made such use of the public library for her kids that library officials offered her the job of superintendent of the circulation department. Lutie’s passion for the public library system would lead her to travel the state indefatigably by train, boat, buggy, and sleigh, preaching the importance of public libraries, and according to legend, wearing out five fur coats in the process. This was no easy feat—Lutie had a bad stammer, but she cared so much for the cause that she wrote her speeches in such a way as to avoid the letters she had trouble with. Before she “retired” to campaign for women’s suffrage and child labor protection, she had established 101 free libraries and 1,480 traveling libraries in the state of Wisconsin.

GABRIELA MISTRAL voice of the people

A poor, rural schoolteacher of mixed race, Gabriela Mistral went on to become the first Latin American woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born in the Chilean village of Montegrande in 1889. Her mother, Petronila Alcayaga, was a teacher of Basque descent, and her father, Jeronimo Villanueva, also a teacher, was a poet of Indian and Jewish birth. Jeronimo was overly fond of wine and not quite so attached to his duties as a breadwinner and father; he deserted the family when Gabriela was three. As a schoolgirl, Gabriela discovered her call to poetry and tapped into her own stubborn independence, switching her birth name, Lucila, for her choice, Gabriela. As an adult, she also chose a fitting surname, Mistral, hinting at a fragrant Mediterranean wind.

Her first love was a hopelessly romantic railroad worker who killed himself when the relationship faltered after two years. Her first book of poetry, Sonetas de la Muerta (Sonnets of Death), was written as a result of her sadness, guilt, and pain over the death of this man. In 1914, she received Chile’s top prize for poetry.

In the ‘20s and ‘30s, she wrote many volumes of poetry, including Desolación (Desolation), Ternura (Tenderness), Questions, Tala, and a mixed-media anthology, Readings for Women. In addition to writing and teaching, Mistral felt a special sympathy for women and children and worked to help victims of World Wars I and II. She made social strides as an educator as well. She initiated programs for schooling the poor, founded a mobile library system, and traveled the world, gleaning whatever information she could to improve Chile’s education system. In 1923, she was named “Teacher of the Nation.” She became an international envoy and ambassador for her country off and on for twenty years, eventually serving in the League of Nations and the United Nations.

In the late 1920s, a military government seized power in Chile and offered Mistral an ambassadorship to all the nations of Central America. Mistral refused to work for the military state and made a scathing public denouncement of the government machine. Her pension was revoked, and Mistral had to support herself, her mother, and her sister through her writing. She lived in exile for a while in France, eventually moving to the United States, where she taught at the University of Puerto Rico and at Middlebury and Barnard Colleges.

In 1945 she received the Nobel Prize. Upon accepting the revered award, Gabriela Mistral, in her plain black velvet, made a sharp contrast with Sweden’s dashing King Gustav. Pointedly, she didn’t accept the prize for herself, but on behalf of “the poets of my race.” Mistral died in 1957 and was mourned by her native Chile, where she was revered as a national treasure. She was the “people’s poet,” giving voice to the humble people to whom she belonged—the Indians, mestizos, and campesinos—and scorning rampant elitism and attempts to create a racial hierarchy in Europe and in her beloved Chile.

I consider myself to be among the children of that twisted thing that is called a racial experience, or better, a racial violence.

Gabriela Mistral

LORRAINE HANSBERRY young, gifted, and Black

Chicago native Lorraine Hansberry was born in 1930 to a politically aware and progressive family who knew that they had to work to make the changes they wished to see. But they paid a price. When Lorraine was only five, she was given a white fur coat for Christmas but was beaten up when she wore it to school. In 1938, the Black family moved to Hyde Park, an exclusive and exclusively white neighborhood. Lorraine’s first memories of living in that house are of violence—being spit on, cursed at, and having bricks thrown through the windows. Her mother Nannie kept a gun inside the house in case it got any worse. An Illinois court evicted them, but her real estate broker father hired NAACP attorneys and had the decision overturned at the Supreme Court level, winning a landmark victory in 1940. He died at a relatively young age, which Lorraine ascribed to the pressure of the long struggle for civil rights.

Lorraine Hansberry’s parents’ work as activists brought them into contact with the Black leaders of the day. She was well accustomed to seeing luminaries such as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B. DuBois in her home. Educated in the segregated public schools of the time, she attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison before she moved to New York for “an education of another kind.”

Throughout her life, she stayed dedicated to the values her parents had instilled in her and worked steadfastly for the betterment of Black people. At a picket line protesting the exclusion of Black athletes from college sports, Lorraine met the man she would marry, a white Jewish liberal, Robert Nemiroff. Lorraine worked for Paul Robeson’s radical Black newspaper Freedom until her husband’s career as a musician and songwriter earned enough to support them so that Lorraine could write full-time.

Her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, was a huge hit, winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award as Best Play of the Year in 1959. Hansberry was the youngest American and the first Black person to receive this prize. This proved to be a watershed event; after the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Black actors and writers entered the creative arts in a surge. Lorraine continued to write plays, but in 1963 was diagnosed with cancer. She died six years after winning the Drama Critics’ Award at the age of thirty-four, tragically cutting short her work. Nevertheless, she made huge strides with her play, forever changing “the Great White Way.”

Racism is a device that, of itself, explained nothing. It is simply a means, an invention to justify the rule of some men over others.

From Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry

SELMA LAGERLÖF AND NELLY SACHS making history

In 1909, Selma Lagerlöf became the first woman and the first Swedish writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was awarded for her body of work, including the 1891 novel To the Story of Gösta Berling and the 1902 two-volume work of fiction Jerusalem, the chronicle of Swedish peasants who migrated to Jerusalem. Selma was the preeminent Swedish writer of her day and produced an impressive body of work: thirty novels and four biographical narratives. She wasn’t content merely to be the most brilliant novelist of her age, however; she also worked extremely hard at obtaining the release of Jewish writer Nelly Sachs from a Nazi concentration camp. Sachs, inspired by her savior, won the Nobel Prize in Literature herself in 1966!

BARBARA TUCHMAN trailblazer

One of the most respected historians of the twentieth century and the only woman to win a Pulitzer Prize twice, Barbara Tuchman has written first-rate chronicles accessible to readers from every walk of life. The core of her theory of history is that true understanding comes from observing the patterns that are created through an aggregation of details and events. Tuchman has covered topics from the Trojan War to the Middle Ages, the leaders of World War I, and the United States’ problematic involvement in Vietnam. All of her books are known for their narrative power and for her portrayals of the players on the world stage as believable individuals.

Born in 1912, Barbara Tuchman attended Radcliffe College and, after graduation, took her first job as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo. She began writing articles for several periodicals and went on to work as a staff editorial assistant at the Nation and a correspondent for London’s New Statesman. From 1934 to 1945, Tuchman worked for the Far East News Desk and Office of War Information. Here, she got firsthand experience of researching and writing about history as it happened.

Tuchman put this invaluable wartime experience to good use with her immense study of the pivotal events prior to World War I, The Guns of August, published in 1962. This thoughtful and thorough history of the thirty days leading up to the first global war spanned all of Europe, detailing the actions of key players in London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Paris. Her book was met with thundering critical praise and acceptance from popular readers and historians the world over—she received her first Pulitzer Prize for this powerful exposé.

Barbara Tuchman’s other books include A Distant Mirror, which explores everyday life in fourteenth-century France, and The March of Folly, an analysis of four conflicts in world history that were mismanaged by governments, from the Trojan War to Britain’s loss of her colonies to Vietnam. Her second Pulitzer Prize was for a biography of US General Joseph Stilwell: a probing look at the relations between China and the United States through the personal wartime experiences of Stilwell.

To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.

Barbara Tuchman

RACHEL CARSON “The Natural World…Supports All Life”

World-famous pioneering ecologist and science writer Rachel Carson turned nature writing on its head. Before she came along, notes Women Public Speakers in the United States, “the masculine orientation [to the subject] emphasized either the dominant, aggressive encounter of humanity with wild nature or the distancing of nature through scientific observation.” By creating a different, more feminine relationship to nature, Rachel Carson portrayed humans as part of the great web of life, separate only in our ability to destroy it. In a very real sense, Carson not only produced the first widely read books on ecology, but laid the foundation for the entire modern environmental movement.

Rachel inherited her love of nature from her mother, Maria, a naturalist at heart, who took Rachel for long walks in woods and meadows. Born in 1907, Rachel was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania, where the evidence of industry was never too far away. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Pennsylvania had changed a great deal from the sylvan woodlands named for colonialist William Penn. Coal and strip mines had devastated some of the finest farmland. Chemical plants, steel mills, and hundreds of factories were belching pure evil into the air.

As she grew, Rachel’s love of nature took an unexpected turn toward oceanography, a budding science limited by technological problems for divers. The young girl was utterly fascinated by this biological science, and though she majored in English and loved to write, she heard the ocean’s siren song increasingly. While studying at the Pennsylvania College for Women in the mid-1920s, she changed her major to zoology, despite the overwhelming advice of her professors to stay the course in English, a much more acceptable major for a young woman. Her advisors were quite correct in their assertions that women were blocked from science; there were very few teaching positions except at the handful of women’s colleges and even fewer job prospects for women outside of academia.

However, Rachel listened to her heart and graduated with high honors, a fellowship to study at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory for the summer, and a full scholarship to Johns Hopkins University in Maryland to study marine zoology. Rachel’s first semester in graduate school coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression. Her family lost their farm, and her parents and brother came to live with her in her tiny campus apartment. She helped make ends meet with part-time teaching at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland while continuing her studies.

In 1935, Rachel’s father suffered a heart attack and died quite suddenly. Rachel looked desperately for work to support her mother and brother, but no one would hire a woman as a full-time university science professor. Brilliant and hardworking, Rachel was encouraged to teach grade school, or better yet, be a housewife, because it was “inappropriate” for women to work in science.

Finally, her unstinting efforts to work in her field were ultimately rewarded by a job writing radio scripts for Elmer Higgins at the United States Bureau of Fisheries—a perfect job for her because it combined her strength in writing with her scientific knowledge. Then a position opened up at the bureau for a junior aquatic biologist. The job was to be awarded to the person with the highest score on a placement test; Rachel aced the test and got the position. Elmer Higgins saw that her writing was excellent, making science accessible to the general public. At his direction, she submitted an essay about the ocean to the Atlantic Monthly, which not only published Rachel’s piece but asked her to freelance for them on a continuing basis, resulting in a book deal from a New York publishing house.

By now, Rachel was the sole support of her mother, brother, and two nieces. She raised the girls, supported her mother, and worked a demanding full-time job, leaving her research and writing to weekends and late nights. But she prevailed nonetheless. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind, debuted in 1941 to a war-preoccupied public. It was a completely original book, enacting a narrative of the seacoast with the flora and fauna as characters, the first indication of Rachel’s unique perspective on nature.

Rachel’s second book, The Sea Around Us, was a nonfiction presentation of the relationship of the ocean to Earth and its inhabitants. This time, the public was ready; she received the National Book Award and made the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years. The Edge of the Sea was also very well received, both critically and publicly. Rachel Carson’s message of kinship with all life combined with a solid foundation of scientific knowledge found an audience in postwar America. However, shy and solitary, Rachel avoided the literary spotlight by accepting a grant that allowed her to return to her beloved seacoast, where she could often be found up to her ankles in mud or sand, doing research.

As her popularity rose and income from book royalties flooded in, Rachel was able to quit her job and build a coastal cottage for herself and her mother. She also returned the grant money that had been given her, asking it to be redistributed to needy scientists. In 1957, a letter from one of Rachel’s readers changed everything. The letter came from Olga Owens Huckins, who was reporting the death of birds after airplanes sprayed dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT), a chemical then in heavy use. Carson was keenly interested in discovering the effects of DDT on the natural habitat. Her findings were shocking; if birds and animals weren’t killed outright by DDT, its effects were even more insidious—birds laid eggs with thin eggshells that broke before the hatchlings were fully developed. DDT was also suspected of being carcinogenic to humans.

Rachel vowed to write a book about the devastating impact of DDT upon nature “or there would be no peace for me,” she proclaimed. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with cancer. Despite chemotherapy, surgery, and constant pain, Rachel worked slowly and unstintingly on her new book. In 1962, Silent Spring was published. It was like a cannon shot. Chemical companies fought back, denied, and ran for cover against the public outcry. Vicious charges against Rachel were aimed at what many of the captains of the chemical industry viewed as her Achilles’ heel: her womanhood. “Not a real scientist,” they claimed. She was also called unstable, foolish, and sentimental for her love of nature. With calm logic and cold reason, Rachel Carson responded in exacting scientific terms, explaining the connections between DDT, the water supply, and the food chain.

Ultimately, President John F. Kennedy assigned his Science Advisory Committee the task of examining the pesticide, and Rachel Carson was proven to be absolutely correct. She died two years later, and although her reputation continued to be maligned by the chemical industry, her books had launched a movement that continues to this day.

Perhaps if Dr. Rachel Carson had been Dr. Richard Carson, the controversy would have been minor…. The American technocrat could not stand the pain of having his achievements deflated by the pen of this slight woman.

Joseph B.C. White, author

BETTY FRIEDAN mother of modern feminism

In 1956, young housewife Betty Friedan submitted her article about the frustrations women experience in their traditional roles as housewives and mothers. She received rejections from McCalls, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and every other publication she approached. The editors, all men in that day and age, were disapproving, going so far as to say any woman would have to be “sick” to not be completely satisfied in her rightful role!

But Betty knew that she and the millions of women like her were not sick, just stifled. Betty had put aside her dream of being a psychologist for fear of becoming a spinster, instead choosing to marry and work for a small newspaper. She was fired from her job when she got pregnant for the second time and began, like most middle-class women of her day and age, to devote herself full-time to the work of running a home and family, what she called “the dream life, supposedly, of American women at that time.”

But, after a decade of such devotion, she still wasn’t happy and theorized that she wasn’t alone. A graduate of Smith College, she decided to poll her fellow alumnae. Most of her classmates who had given up promising careers to devote themselves to their families felt incomplete; many were deeply depressed. They felt guilty for not being completely content sacrificing their individual dreams for their families, each woman certain that her dissatisfaction was a personal failing. Betty called this “the problem that has no name,” and she gave it one, “the feminine mystique.”

Over the next five years, her rejected article evolved into a book as she interviewed hundreds of women around the country. The Feminine Mystique explored the issue of women’s lives in depth, criticizing American advertisers’ exclusively domestic portrayal of women and issuing a call to action for women to say no to the housewife role and adopt “a new life plan” in which they could have both families and careers. With its publication in 1963, The Feminine Mystique hit America like a thunderbolt; publisher W.W. Norton had printed only two thousand copies, never anticipating the sale of three million hardcover copies alone.

Unintentionally, Betty had started a revolution. She was flooded with letters from women saying her book had given them the courage to change their lives and advocate for equal access to employment opportunities and other equality issues. Ultimately, the response to Betty’s challenge created the momentum that led to the formalization of the second wave of the US women’s movement in 1966 with the formation of NOW, the National Organization for Women.

Betty was NOW’s first president and took her role as a leader in the women’s movement seriously, traveling to give lectures and take part in campaigns for change, engendering many of the freedoms women now enjoy. She pushed for equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and access to birth control and legalized abortion. In 1970, she quit NOW to fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, and in 1975, was named Humanist of the Year. Of her, author Barbara Seaman wrote, “Betty Friedan is to the women’s movement what Martin Luther King was to blacks.”

In 1981, responding to critics who claimed feminism ignored the importance of relationships and families to most women, she penned The Second Stage, in which she called on men and women to work together to make the home and the workplace havens for both genders. Betty made another revolution with her 2006 book, The Fountain of Age, raising consciousness about society’s stereotypes about aging decades after she had, as futurist Alvin Toffler so aptly put it, “pulled the trigger of history” with The Feminine Mystique. And she didn’t stop there, but went on to advocate for better balance between work and family life with her book Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family, as well as finding time to pen a memoir, Life So Far. Betty passed away at home in 2006 due to a heart attack on her eighty-fifth birthday, but her life continues to inspire women the world over.

It’s been a lot of fun making the revolution.

Betty Friedan

TONI MORRISON the truest eye

Toni Morrison comes from small-town, working-class Ohio, a state that fell “between” on the Civil War issue of slavery, a state with many stops along the underground railroad, and a state where many crosses burned “neither plantation nor ghetto.” She has made this her canvas for her rich, original stories that dare tell uncomfortable truths. And for her daring, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born in 1931 as Chloe Anthony Wofford, Toni and her parents worked hard as sharecroppers in their adopted Northern home of Lorain, Ohio. She was keenly interested in language as a child and loved hearing ghost stories, songs, and thundering sermons at church. After high school, she attended Howard University and graduated at the age of twenty-two, following that with a master’s program at Cornell. Her thesis paper examined the theme of suicide in the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. She began teaching at Howard and met and married a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison, with whom she had two sons, Harold Ford and Slade. The marriage was short-lived, and Toni took the children and moved to Syracuse, and then later to New York City, where she was hired by Random House as senior editor. She worked on several major Black autobiographies of the time, including those of Black Power revolutionary Angela Davis and world champion boxer Muhammed Ali.

As a writer, Toni Morrison made an immediate mark upon America’s literary landscape with The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, and Sula, published three years later. Her next book, Song of Solomon, won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1978. In 1983, she left Random House to devote herself full-time to writing and spent the next five years writing Beloved, the fantastical and tragic story of ex-slave Sethe and her children.

Her writing focuses on Black women who had previously been ignored. Her lyrical language combines with both realistic and mythic plot elements to create a distinctive style all her own. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature; she was the first Black American to do so. She said, “I am outrageously happy. But what is most wonderful for me personally is to know that the prize has been awarded to an African American. Winning as an American is very special—but winning as a Black American is a knockout.”

Had I loved the life that the state planned for me from the beginning, I would have lived and died in somebody else’s kitchen.

Toni Morrison, in a speech to the International Literary Congress in New York