The Norton Book of Women's Lives - Hardcover

4.14

125 ratings by Goodreads

9780393035322: The Norton Book of Women's Lives

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393035328 ISBN 13: 9780393035322

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1993

Culled from the autobiographies, journals, and memoirs of some of this centuries most prominent women, this celebration of women's lives includes the work of Isak Dinesen, Maya Angelou, Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, Annie Dillard, and others.

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Review:

This amazingly rich lode of memoirs, letters, and diaries jumbles together a great roster of 20th-century women, including Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Bernadette Devlin, Emily Mashinini, Sara Suleri, and Santha Rama Rau.

Le Ly Hayslip, the sixth child in a Vietnamese peasant family, describes a life pinched between the violence of Viet Cong revolutionaries and South Vietnamese republicans. Poet and lesbian feminist Audre Lorde writes about being introduced to the wonders of reading as a stubborn, bright, legally blind youngster. "I lay spreadeagled on the floor of the Children's Room like a furious brown toad, screaming bloody murder and embarrassing my mother to death," she recalls. Jill Ker Conway tells of her father's depression and death when a drought crushed their sheep farm in the Australian outback.

The excerpts drop us smack into the middle of each life; inventive cross-referencing encourages the reader to fly back and forth, sampling other writings on "filial exasperation," for example, or child's-eye views of romance and war. --Francesca Coltrera

About the Author:

Phyllis Rose is the author of Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages and other noted works of biography and criticism. She is professor of English at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

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