Hello Audacious subscribers! Let’s get to know each other. If you’re new here, then we’d love to meet you. If you’re not new but haven’t chimed in yet, we’d love to meet you as well. All are welcome!
What brought you to Audacious Women, Creative Lives.
The last book you read by/about an audacious woman writer or artist (one that you would recommend).
(Optional) What did you like about the book, or what did you love learning about this woman’s life or art?
And to make sure you’re not all telling just me about your wonderful selves, find two other reader’s comments that resonate with you and say hi and what drew you to their comment.
See you in the comments!
Anne
NOTE: Make sure to respond to people’s comments by hitting “reply” so they will see your comment (rather than in the body of your comment). Thanks!!
I’m late to the party, here to sing the praises of audacious journalist Nan Robertson—
Pulitzer prizewinner, lifelong shit disturber and author of the 1992 classic THE GIRLS IN THE BALCONY: MEN, WOMEN AND THE NEW YORK TIMES. Through devastating anecdotes and vivid prose, Robertson documents the systemic gender discrimination that infested the American newspaper of record from its earliest days, when rival papers employed intrepid women reporters but the Times froze them out. The saga culminates in an epochal sex discrimination case that exposed the paper’s betrayal of its liberal values. Unforgettable characters leap from the pages, each one an unsung warrior for women’s equality. Robertson, who died some years ago, was an unstoppable force, the survivor of severe alcoholism and a near-fatal bout with toxic shock syndrome, which led to the amputation of all her fingertips and forced her to learn to type all over again. Splendidly done, grippingly told.
What an awesome community Anne is putting together.
Where in the world I am is in a college town in the middle of Missouri, where I am a producer/professor working in public radio and journalism.
My first connection with Anne was from reading and reviewing her wonderful book "Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy," which was inspiring.
My reading and writing on audacious women is usually about one of the most Audacious of all, Jane Austen, and I do a Substack on the badassery of Austen and the connections to her work, from Mary Wollstonecraft, the Romantics, and Shakespeare to contemporary romcoms and retellings.
Looking forward to the community and conversations here! -Janet
Hi Anne & everyone here, enjoying all your interesting comments & reading recommendations and being part of this great community. Here's my tuppence worth. 1. I live in Cambridge, UK and write a Substack about the women who had the audacity to come here, back in the 1870s and 1880s, to get access to a university education. It wasn't easy for them or for the women who came after them, but they never gave up - and I am very grateful for that, having followed in their footsteps to embark on my PhD here almost 100 years later. 2. Just discovered that I first heard Anne speaking at the brilliant Biographers Without Borders (organized by BIO) symposium in Oxford in 2016. She & other speakers were an inspiration at around the time I was starting my own biographical research. So I was thrilled to discover her Substack this year. 3. and 4. The last book I read by/about an audacious woman was one I've just reviewed for the TLS, namely a memoir called Better Broken Than New by the Anglo-Guyanese writer Lisa St Aubin de Terán. At first I didn't like it - too rambling, too diffuse - but as I read more I couldn't help admiring her courage, honesty and zest for life, wherever it takes her.
3. The Tomboy Bride, Harriet Bachus Fish (life in a 19th c mining town); Ninth Street Women; Mary Gabriel (5 modern artists in NYC); and My Life in France, Julia Child (self-explanatory memoir)
Hello! This greeting is very late due to work (a small editing job that grew into a large one) and then an illness but I'm very glad to be here. I live a short distance from Chicago. I've lived in many different places but have always come back to the Chicago area. It's home.
I started following Anne on Twitter ages ago and I always enjoy reading her newletters. I aspire to finally read the Woolson biography this year! I came across Woolson for the first time during a stay at Mackinac Island (she lived there and set one of her novels there) and I've been very curious about her ever since.
Right now, I am reading This Little Art by Kate Briggs and I'd highly recommend it. I'm not sure what I'd call it exactly--perhaps a memoir about translation? Briggs has translated some work by Roland Barthes and This Little Art is her contemplation on the craft and struggles of translation work. She also considers the female translators who have come before her. It ties in very well with the discussion about the new translation of Beauvoir's The Second Sex. I'm so glad to learn this new translation is out! It sounds very much needed and very timely too. Thanks for writing about it, Anne. I would have never known otherwise.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned the French writer Annie Ernaux, who recently won the Nobel Prize in literature. She definitely qualifies as an audacious writer as she covers many topics most women writers would not care to touch. Also, she fits well with de Beauvoir in many respects. I’d recommend her memoir The Years. She shows how much the political influences the personal.
Hi everyone, I'm a bit late to the dialogue. I reside in Fairfax, Virginia, where I work in communications consulting while writing creatively (essays, reviews, some short fiction) in my free time. I also dabble in painting, sketching and photography. I'm interested in this community for sharing, encouragement, and energy around living a creative life -- how we invest in our creativity, overcome barriers, and learn from other creative women, past and present. The last book I read about an audacious woman was Illuminations by Mary Sharratt: a novel of Hildegard von Bingen. Both Hildegard and Mary are women of note, in my book. I am inspired by the range of their expression (writing, music, art, horticulture) and by their awareness of what it takes to compose a life. Glad to be part of this community.
Hi, everyone! I'm a little late to the meet and greet, but Anne assured me yesterday that's it not too late . . . I'm writing from Springfield, Missouri, in the Ozarks, where I arrived as a professor of American literature in the mid-1990s. (Now it's called US literatures.) I met Anne when she was finishing up her fabulous biography of the audacious woman writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson. I was then writing about other 19th-century expat US women (and I still am--see my Substack, All Things Italy. I'm also a member of BIO, like Anne and Robin Rausch, who commented just below.) But I love reading about women in general, especially memoir and biography. The last I read was Ilyon Woo's book on Ellen Craft and her husband William. I first learned of this woman who escaped enslavement back in the mid-90s, when I was deep-diving into narratives of enslavement. But now, so much later in my own life, and in light of Woo's craft on the Crafts, I noted how Ellen's work as a talented and creative seamstress contributed to her audacity to cross-dress and flee her southern master. Woo's first popular book was on the Shakers and how they shook up conventional marriage, following the teachings of their founder, Mother Ann Lee. (My first book was also on the Shakers, but it didn't make such a big splash. Sigh.) I love reading Anne's letters, which I have subscribed to for years. I love seeing the evolution of her interests and following her journey. So inspiring! Glad to be a part of this community.
Greetings Folks! I'm from Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC. I met Anne years ago at a BIO meeting and have enjoyed following her work and adventures. We share an affinity for Scotland. I had a fascination with Scotland as a child. For no apparent reason other than an interest in the Loch Ness Monster and a desire to learn to play the bagpipes. Decades later, after an early mid-life crisis, an opportunity to live and work in Edinburgh dropped in my lap. It seemed providential, and my year in Scotland healed me in ways I could never have imagined.
I am currently reading Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick. I saw a reference to it years ago and happened upon a copy in the used bookstore at my local public library. It's been sitting on my shelf for years and recently called to me. I have many unread books on my shelves. And I've always felt that they call to you to be read at the appropriate time. It's a great memoir of a mother daughter relationship. And Gornick is still writing and publishing in her 80s!
So many of your comments have resonated with me! What a great community!
Hi Elaine--I’m so glad you’ve introduced yourself. Splitting your time between Montreal and Mexico sounds like a great way to live! I haven’t been to the Palermo side of Sicily, but I’m hoping to in June. I’m so glad you’re doing the Cummari Goddess course! I’ll see you there!
This is quite an exciting mix of audacious women writers, so I am happy to be here in such good company. I am currently in southern Mexico on the pacific coast where I have been spending my winters for the past few years. I live in Montreal and still teach the occasional course there, mostly in the summer. Rather than say I'm semi-retired, I could say it's a bit like giving up an addiction. I love literature and now do some fiction writing of my own as opposed to academic writing.
My dissertation on Henry James was published years ago by Routledge. I have read Constance Fenimore Woolson, which piqued my interest in Anne's writings. I certainly admire her courage in leaving the University and travelling on her own. I love exploring. Last April I was in Palermo, Sicily, but didn't know about the woman's retreat there. That sounds like a wonderful place to spend time. However, I did sign up for the course on Goddesses and matriarchy.
I'm also a buddhist, so one of the audacious women writers who interests me is the Zen Buddhist, Ruth Ozeki, esp her novel A Tale for the Time Being. Amongst other things, it draws attention to how we are part of the universe, not just passive observers -- our participation counts. I also admire Rachel Cusk and highly recommend Outline, an innovative and eye-opening feminist work. Cusk highlights male privilege and the Western sense of entitlement under a patriarchal and capitalist culture.
I’m in Omaha, Nebraska U.S, the literal middle of the country. My family and I have been here about 6 years. We’ve lived all over the US.
Anne brings me here. I came across her Substack in one of Sarah Fay’s Friday parties and have really enjoyed her writing and am excited about “Audacious Women.”
I’m rereading parts of Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds. I love the lyric quality of her writing (particularly, as I am interested in doing more of this in my own writing). The whole book is about voice, her voice, her mother’s, other women’s, the voice as emptiness, mystery. As a person who lived without “a voice” or much agency for a very long time, Williams’ words exploring both are familiar, encouraging, and enlightening to me.
Hello to all the creative and audacious woman out there!
I'm Tessa Floreano, a writer of history and historical tales about Italians set in Europe and the Pacific Northwest. My latest fiction project was the novella, SLAIN OVER SPUMONI, a 1920 romantic mystery set in Grado, a spa town near Venice that my family in Italy has been patronizing for decades. I followed that up with my first nonfiction book, ITALIANS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, that a group of us is now working on turning it into a documentary as well as a travelling exhibit. My next novel involving murder, matrimony, and mayhem set in Belle Epoque Italy will be out in December.
I live in the Seattle area and I don't recall how I started following Anne, but it had something to do with her Little Women book as well as her work documenting Constance Fenimore Woolson. I was on her newsletter list, and then when she started her Substack, I just naturally followed her journey there, too.
One book by an audacious artist and writer that really helped me, a non-dancer, to see my creative life in a new way is Twyla Tharp and her book, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. I highly recommend it. I often think about how she approaches developing a new dance when she walks into her empty, white-walled studio. It reminds me of the blank page a writer faces when beginning a new writing project.
Hello Everyone, and a special greeting for Anne. Anne, if I recall correctly, our writerly connection began as an offshoot of Binders, a Facebook group started in 2014 by two women writers and numbered in the tens of thousands by the time I left Facebook in 2020. Binders was (is?) dedicated to women in literary arts and in any profession that somehow centers the written word. It's been a joy to watch (and read!) Anne's creative life evolve. Thank you for creating this space! I'm mostly off all social media these days, but finding renewed interest in expanding my community through Substack- where the reading, sharing, commenting is more intentional and lasting.
I live on Washington state's Olympic Peninsula, in the rainshadow of the Olympic Mountains, near the shore of the Salish Sea. I am a novelist and also Finance Manager of Copper Canyon Press, the renowned poetry publisher.
The first book that comes to mind in response to Anne's question is Rachel Corbett's "You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin", a portrait of the complicated relationship between the poet and the sculptor. This chronicle alone is worth the price of admission, but what sparked my curiosity were the women in these men's lives that we don't know enough about: the German artists Clara Westhoff and her best friend Paula Becker (Westhoff would eventually marry Rilke) and Rodin's lover, the sculptor Camille Claudel. These women were powerful artists in their own right, but overshadowed by their famous partners. A fascinating book that is still needling away at my brain as fodder for a novel...
My current obsession is Mary Magdalene. I just read Jean-Yves LeLoup's The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and am following her life down a rabbit hole, also as research for a novel (that would, believe it or not, tie Belle Époque Paris, Rodin's Paris, to 1st Century Provence!).
I love reading the wonderful comments here and the many book recommendations. This is a precious space!
I live in Macon, Georgia, about an hour south of Atlanta. I have appreciated Anne's books that I've read, and the talks that I've seen her give. In fact, her Substack post about women and solitude in which she talked about May Sarton's work got me on quite a Sarton binge this past fall. I sat on the incredible Driftwood Beach at Jeckyll Island, wrapped in a shawl, and read Journal of a Solitude--it was quite an experience. Her novel A Reckoning is now one of my very favorites. As I was reading her, I realized that she writes about solitude, writing, and gardening in ways that I have tried and aspired to, but never quite gotten right.
(In response to the last question, I was actually going to mention the new biography of Carson McCullers that I'm reading right now (which is really good and also really irking me in its characterization of Eudora Welty), but I'll wait on that, and leave my answer here about Sarton.)
Thank you, Nancy! Mary Wollstonecraft was one incredibly audacious woman! I loved Charlotte Gordon’s books about her and May Shelley, Romantic Outlaws. And what cool stuff about her life and the heroine’s journey! I’ve gotten interested in that in the last year or so as well.
I am from Minnesota (USA) but now live in South Carolina. At present, I am in Colorado for a visit. What brings me here is Anne! I discovered Anne after reading The Master, by Colm Toibin, and I did some querying on Constance Fenimore Woolson. It was about the time Anne was embarking on her year abroad, which has been so much fun to follow.
The last book I read about an audacious woman writer or artist? MANY books about Mary Wollstonecraft. I just finished writing a biographical novel about Mary, which will be published in February 2025. The best biographies of her, in my humble opinion, are Vindication, by Lyndall Gordon and Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, by Janet Todd. There are many others that are also very good, but I found those two to be the most thorough. Mary Wollstonecraft was such a complex figure. What I loved about her is discovering through my research and plotting/writing my novel is how she lived out the heroine's journey as defined by Maureen Murdock in her book, The Heroine's Journey (which I would highly recommend). Murdock lays alongside Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey the unique journey women make in their development throughout life. To me, Mary Wollstonecraft's life story validates Murdock's framework.
Hello! I am Christina from Melrose, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. I am a writer and avid traveler and book lover. Hmm, the last book about an audacious woman that I read is called Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, and it accompanies a mind-blowingly amazing exhibit of Varo's works that were featured at an Art Institute of Chicago exhibit last summer/fall. Varo is a mid-20th century surrealist painter who broke out from under her French poet lover's shadow when he left Mexico City to move back to Paris in the mid-1940s. Varos and Leonora Carrington were friends and helped lift each other up as artists and women.
One of my favorite books about audacious women is Beryl Markham's West With The Night, an autobiography by a British woman who grew up in Kenya and became one of the first--and most audacious!--women pilots.
Hello from Mainz, Germany! I’m currently teaching American studies at uni Mainz. I am reading Heroines by Kate Zambreno which is autotheory-ish and about the wives of famous modernist writers. I’m really enjoying it and slowly adding to my TBR list of audacious women. Speaking of Simone de Beauvoir elsewhere in the thread, Zambreno has a quote from Simone that I can’t stop thinking about that talks about how the violence of patriarchy often comes in the form of logic. Now my colleague and I are collecting moments of male logic that feel so frustrating and now we are noticing it everywhere.
Just read the Tove Jansson piece here — wonderful essay! And images — there were paintings there that I'd never seen before. One tiny correction — her parents were Finnish, not Swedish (they were members of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland).
Hello! I'm a former academic who lives in Sweden and now mostly writes. I'm not quite sure how I found your newsletter, but I'm glad that I did! Writing and art seem to be common themes to many of the substacks I've landed on.
Your nice invitation sent me to my own (newish) newsletter in a mild panic, to see what proportion of the writers whose work I've looked at were women. Am relieved to say that it's actually more women than men, in part because a full 5 of the 12 essays bounce off stories by Tove Jansson (Finnish writer and artist). It's so easy to end up being disproportionate the other way, if one isn't thinking about it consciously. (That's true even though I'm a woman.).
It's interesting about S de Beauvoir and J-P Sartre. As a teenager I was fascinated by their relationship, but I read him and found her hard to get into. Now have been thinking of looking again at her novel The Mandarins in case it resonates completely differently from an older perspective.
On Ursula LeGuin, I actually reread the Earthsea Books a few years ago for the first time since childhood. She's an incredible writer, of course. But my memory from childhood had been that the Earthsea books were cold, somehow. It was astonishing to reread them and see that they're actually literally cold, in the sense that the characters are often in cold places. Fascinating.
Oh — I just looked at the Audacious Women website and see that the piece on Tove Jansson is out from behind a paywall now! Will go and read it! That may be the piece that got me here, though I was only able to read the first couple of paragraphs then.
1. I’m in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I’ve lived since retiring as a professor of American literature. I have published a biography of the American poet Marianne Moore and am working on a group biography of the Stieglitz circle, which includes Georgia O’Keeffe and six other artists.
2. I know Anne through Biographers International Organization (BIO).
3. The last book I read about (and by) an audacious woman is Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra. It’s an outstanding biography of an amazing woman. It will go on sale later this month (March 2024). Highly recommend!
I am 61 years old and have lived in or near Canton, Ohio for my entire life. I was drawn to Anne’s writing about Constance Fenimore Woolson in 2016. My younger daughter had completed a National History Day paper about nearby Zoar, Ohio and was now working there in summers as a tour guide. Zoar was a “Separatist” community from 1817 through the 1890s. I was fascinated to learn Constance Fenimore Woolson traveled by train to Zoar on more than one occasion circa 1870 (roughy) and wrote of these experiences in Harpers Magazine. She even composed a short story, or perhaps more than one, about Zoar’s inhabitants.
Anne’s book about Woolson was my first-ever purchase of a digital book! When the New York Times reviewed the book quite favorably I was in awe of Anne.
In this discussion thread I’m fascinated by Anne’s mention of the “brain” relationship between de Beauvoir and Sartre. I also enjoy the mentions by Veenita and Jon above regarding women and the education they strove for. Although an aunt of mine born in 1927 didn’t face nearly the obstacles mentioned in the above posts, she nevertheless was determined enough to achieve a business degree in the 1940s and obtain the position of School District Treasurer, no doubt rare for a woman, which she held until her retirement.
My personal favorite audacious woman author can arguably be described as “from the past,” as she published her first novel in the 1970s. I find Lionel Shriver’s novels to be filled with bold voices. Whether women or men, her characters get right to the point, vividly! To mention two of her novels: “The Post-Birthday World” presents 2-part chapters which map out alternative scenarios for the protagonist depending on a choice she faced at a moment in time, then concludes with a 1-part-only chapter which plausibly ties each scenario to a common ending. Dazzling. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” presents a story I would never, ever want to read, ponder, or watch the news about. But because she wrote it, the novel mesmerized me.
1. Where in the world? Right now I am sitting in a cafe in Castlerock on the north coast of Northern Ireland, refuelling after a sensational couple of hours walking on the beach and cliff tops.
2. The literalist answer is ferry and car, but the reason is that my partner had a couple of days work at Queen’s University Belfast and we’ve tacked on a few days holiday.
3. Not exactly the last, but I got The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin for Christmas.
4. I already knew the books well, of course—she is my all time favourite writer. What was new, apart from the gorgeous illustrations, was the overall Introduction, and afterwords to each of the five books, which taught me a lot about her creative process. For instance, she drew the famous Earthsea map before she started writing, but had very little idea of where the story would go.
She says, “None of them (the first three books) was closely plotted or planned before writing; in each of them much of the story came to me as I followed what I wrote where it inevitably led.” Which makes me feel validated, as that's pretty much the way I write, and there are lots of people who are busy telling you you need to plot everything out beforehand.
Hello! I'll get us started. I'm in North Berwick, Scotland. I recently read Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre, by Hazel Rowley. I was fascinated by her many love affairs, particularly with Nelson Algren, and how her relationship with Sartre was intellectual rather than sexual (except for a brief period at the beginning).
I’m late to the party, here to sing the praises of audacious journalist Nan Robertson—
Pulitzer prizewinner, lifelong shit disturber and author of the 1992 classic THE GIRLS IN THE BALCONY: MEN, WOMEN AND THE NEW YORK TIMES. Through devastating anecdotes and vivid prose, Robertson documents the systemic gender discrimination that infested the American newspaper of record from its earliest days, when rival papers employed intrepid women reporters but the Times froze them out. The saga culminates in an epochal sex discrimination case that exposed the paper’s betrayal of its liberal values. Unforgettable characters leap from the pages, each one an unsung warrior for women’s equality. Robertson, who died some years ago, was an unstoppable force, the survivor of severe alcoholism and a near-fatal bout with toxic shock syndrome, which led to the amputation of all her fingertips and forced her to learn to type all over again. Splendidly done, grippingly told.
Thank you so much for introducing yourself, Janet! It’s wonderful to have you here. 😊
Hi everyone,
What an awesome community Anne is putting together.
Where in the world I am is in a college town in the middle of Missouri, where I am a producer/professor working in public radio and journalism.
My first connection with Anne was from reading and reviewing her wonderful book "Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy," which was inspiring.
My reading and writing on audacious women is usually about one of the most Audacious of all, Jane Austen, and I do a Substack on the badassery of Austen and the connections to her work, from Mary Wollstonecraft, the Romantics, and Shakespeare to contemporary romcoms and retellings.
Looking forward to the community and conversations here! -Janet
Hi Anne & everyone here, enjoying all your interesting comments & reading recommendations and being part of this great community. Here's my tuppence worth. 1. I live in Cambridge, UK and write a Substack about the women who had the audacity to come here, back in the 1870s and 1880s, to get access to a university education. It wasn't easy for them or for the women who came after them, but they never gave up - and I am very grateful for that, having followed in their footsteps to embark on my PhD here almost 100 years later. 2. Just discovered that I first heard Anne speaking at the brilliant Biographers Without Borders (organized by BIO) symposium in Oxford in 2016. She & other speakers were an inspiration at around the time I was starting my own biographical research. So I was thrilled to discover her Substack this year. 3. and 4. The last book I read by/about an audacious woman was one I've just reviewed for the TLS, namely a memoir called Better Broken Than New by the Anglo-Guyanese writer Lisa St Aubin de Terán. At first I didn't like it - too rambling, too diffuse - but as I read more I couldn't help admiring her courage, honesty and zest for life, wherever it takes her.
1. North Carolina (but really a NYer.)
2. I have three good NF books to share.
3. The Tomboy Bride, Harriet Bachus Fish (life in a 19th c mining town); Ninth Street Women; Mary Gabriel (5 modern artists in NYC); and My Life in France, Julia Child (self-explanatory memoir)
Oh! So, not Chicago. I went to college in Evanston many years ago.
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing.
Hello! This greeting is very late due to work (a small editing job that grew into a large one) and then an illness but I'm very glad to be here. I live a short distance from Chicago. I've lived in many different places but have always come back to the Chicago area. It's home.
I started following Anne on Twitter ages ago and I always enjoy reading her newletters. I aspire to finally read the Woolson biography this year! I came across Woolson for the first time during a stay at Mackinac Island (she lived there and set one of her novels there) and I've been very curious about her ever since.
Right now, I am reading This Little Art by Kate Briggs and I'd highly recommend it. I'm not sure what I'd call it exactly--perhaps a memoir about translation? Briggs has translated some work by Roland Barthes and This Little Art is her contemplation on the craft and struggles of translation work. She also considers the female translators who have come before her. It ties in very well with the discussion about the new translation of Beauvoir's The Second Sex. I'm so glad to learn this new translation is out! It sounds very much needed and very timely too. Thanks for writing about it, Anne. I would have never known otherwise.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned the French writer Annie Ernaux, who recently won the Nobel Prize in literature. She definitely qualifies as an audacious writer as she covers many topics most women writers would not care to touch. Also, she fits well with de Beauvoir in many respects. I’d recommend her memoir The Years. She shows how much the political influences the personal.
Hi everyone, I'm a bit late to the dialogue. I reside in Fairfax, Virginia, where I work in communications consulting while writing creatively (essays, reviews, some short fiction) in my free time. I also dabble in painting, sketching and photography. I'm interested in this community for sharing, encouragement, and energy around living a creative life -- how we invest in our creativity, overcome barriers, and learn from other creative women, past and present. The last book I read about an audacious woman was Illuminations by Mary Sharratt: a novel of Hildegard von Bingen. Both Hildegard and Mary are women of note, in my book. I am inspired by the range of their expression (writing, music, art, horticulture) and by their awareness of what it takes to compose a life. Glad to be part of this community.
Hi, everyone! I'm a little late to the meet and greet, but Anne assured me yesterday that's it not too late . . . I'm writing from Springfield, Missouri, in the Ozarks, where I arrived as a professor of American literature in the mid-1990s. (Now it's called US literatures.) I met Anne when she was finishing up her fabulous biography of the audacious woman writer, Constance Fenimore Woolson. I was then writing about other 19th-century expat US women (and I still am--see my Substack, All Things Italy. I'm also a member of BIO, like Anne and Robin Rausch, who commented just below.) But I love reading about women in general, especially memoir and biography. The last I read was Ilyon Woo's book on Ellen Craft and her husband William. I first learned of this woman who escaped enslavement back in the mid-90s, when I was deep-diving into narratives of enslavement. But now, so much later in my own life, and in light of Woo's craft on the Crafts, I noted how Ellen's work as a talented and creative seamstress contributed to her audacity to cross-dress and flee her southern master. Woo's first popular book was on the Shakers and how they shook up conventional marriage, following the teachings of their founder, Mother Ann Lee. (My first book was also on the Shakers, but it didn't make such a big splash. Sigh.) I love reading Anne's letters, which I have subscribed to for years. I love seeing the evolution of her interests and following her journey. So inspiring! Glad to be a part of this community.
Greetings Folks! I'm from Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC. I met Anne years ago at a BIO meeting and have enjoyed following her work and adventures. We share an affinity for Scotland. I had a fascination with Scotland as a child. For no apparent reason other than an interest in the Loch Ness Monster and a desire to learn to play the bagpipes. Decades later, after an early mid-life crisis, an opportunity to live and work in Edinburgh dropped in my lap. It seemed providential, and my year in Scotland healed me in ways I could never have imagined.
I am currently reading Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick. I saw a reference to it years ago and happened upon a copy in the used bookstore at my local public library. It's been sitting on my shelf for years and recently called to me. I have many unread books on my shelves. And I've always felt that they call to you to be read at the appropriate time. It's a great memoir of a mother daughter relationship. And Gornick is still writing and publishing in her 80s!
So many of your comments have resonated with me! What a great community!
Hi Elaine--I’m so glad you’ve introduced yourself. Splitting your time between Montreal and Mexico sounds like a great way to live! I haven’t been to the Palermo side of Sicily, but I’m hoping to in June. I’m so glad you’re doing the Cummari Goddess course! I’ll see you there!
This is quite an exciting mix of audacious women writers, so I am happy to be here in such good company. I am currently in southern Mexico on the pacific coast where I have been spending my winters for the past few years. I live in Montreal and still teach the occasional course there, mostly in the summer. Rather than say I'm semi-retired, I could say it's a bit like giving up an addiction. I love literature and now do some fiction writing of my own as opposed to academic writing.
My dissertation on Henry James was published years ago by Routledge. I have read Constance Fenimore Woolson, which piqued my interest in Anne's writings. I certainly admire her courage in leaving the University and travelling on her own. I love exploring. Last April I was in Palermo, Sicily, but didn't know about the woman's retreat there. That sounds like a wonderful place to spend time. However, I did sign up for the course on Goddesses and matriarchy.
I'm also a buddhist, so one of the audacious women writers who interests me is the Zen Buddhist, Ruth Ozeki, esp her novel A Tale for the Time Being. Amongst other things, it draws attention to how we are part of the universe, not just passive observers -- our participation counts. I also admire Rachel Cusk and highly recommend Outline, an innovative and eye-opening feminist work. Cusk highlights male privilege and the Western sense of entitlement under a patriarchal and capitalist culture.
Hi all,
I’m in Omaha, Nebraska U.S, the literal middle of the country. My family and I have been here about 6 years. We’ve lived all over the US.
Anne brings me here. I came across her Substack in one of Sarah Fay’s Friday parties and have really enjoyed her writing and am excited about “Audacious Women.”
I’m rereading parts of Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds. I love the lyric quality of her writing (particularly, as I am interested in doing more of this in my own writing). The whole book is about voice, her voice, her mother’s, other women’s, the voice as emptiness, mystery. As a person who lived without “a voice” or much agency for a very long time, Williams’ words exploring both are familiar, encouraging, and enlightening to me.
Hello to all the creative and audacious woman out there!
I'm Tessa Floreano, a writer of history and historical tales about Italians set in Europe and the Pacific Northwest. My latest fiction project was the novella, SLAIN OVER SPUMONI, a 1920 romantic mystery set in Grado, a spa town near Venice that my family in Italy has been patronizing for decades. I followed that up with my first nonfiction book, ITALIANS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, that a group of us is now working on turning it into a documentary as well as a travelling exhibit. My next novel involving murder, matrimony, and mayhem set in Belle Epoque Italy will be out in December.
I live in the Seattle area and I don't recall how I started following Anne, but it had something to do with her Little Women book as well as her work documenting Constance Fenimore Woolson. I was on her newsletter list, and then when she started her Substack, I just naturally followed her journey there, too.
One book by an audacious artist and writer that really helped me, a non-dancer, to see my creative life in a new way is Twyla Tharp and her book, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. I highly recommend it. I often think about how she approaches developing a new dance when she walks into her empty, white-walled studio. It reminds me of the blank page a writer faces when beginning a new writing project.
Hello Everyone, and a special greeting for Anne. Anne, if I recall correctly, our writerly connection began as an offshoot of Binders, a Facebook group started in 2014 by two women writers and numbered in the tens of thousands by the time I left Facebook in 2020. Binders was (is?) dedicated to women in literary arts and in any profession that somehow centers the written word. It's been a joy to watch (and read!) Anne's creative life evolve. Thank you for creating this space! I'm mostly off all social media these days, but finding renewed interest in expanding my community through Substack- where the reading, sharing, commenting is more intentional and lasting.
I live on Washington state's Olympic Peninsula, in the rainshadow of the Olympic Mountains, near the shore of the Salish Sea. I am a novelist and also Finance Manager of Copper Canyon Press, the renowned poetry publisher.
The first book that comes to mind in response to Anne's question is Rachel Corbett's "You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin", a portrait of the complicated relationship between the poet and the sculptor. This chronicle alone is worth the price of admission, but what sparked my curiosity were the women in these men's lives that we don't know enough about: the German artists Clara Westhoff and her best friend Paula Becker (Westhoff would eventually marry Rilke) and Rodin's lover, the sculptor Camille Claudel. These women were powerful artists in their own right, but overshadowed by their famous partners. A fascinating book that is still needling away at my brain as fodder for a novel...
My current obsession is Mary Magdalene. I just read Jean-Yves LeLoup's The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and am following her life down a rabbit hole, also as research for a novel (that would, believe it or not, tie Belle Époque Paris, Rodin's Paris, to 1st Century Provence!).
I love reading the wonderful comments here and the many book recommendations. This is a precious space!
I live in Macon, Georgia, about an hour south of Atlanta. I have appreciated Anne's books that I've read, and the talks that I've seen her give. In fact, her Substack post about women and solitude in which she talked about May Sarton's work got me on quite a Sarton binge this past fall. I sat on the incredible Driftwood Beach at Jeckyll Island, wrapped in a shawl, and read Journal of a Solitude--it was quite an experience. Her novel A Reckoning is now one of my very favorites. As I was reading her, I realized that she writes about solitude, writing, and gardening in ways that I have tried and aspired to, but never quite gotten right.
(In response to the last question, I was actually going to mention the new biography of Carson McCullers that I'm reading right now (which is really good and also really irking me in its characterization of Eudora Welty), but I'll wait on that, and leave my answer here about Sarton.)
Thank you, Nancy! Mary Wollstonecraft was one incredibly audacious woman! I loved Charlotte Gordon’s books about her and May Shelley, Romantic Outlaws. And what cool stuff about her life and the heroine’s journey! I’ve gotten interested in that in the last year or so as well.
I am from Minnesota (USA) but now live in South Carolina. At present, I am in Colorado for a visit. What brings me here is Anne! I discovered Anne after reading The Master, by Colm Toibin, and I did some querying on Constance Fenimore Woolson. It was about the time Anne was embarking on her year abroad, which has been so much fun to follow.
The last book I read about an audacious woman writer or artist? MANY books about Mary Wollstonecraft. I just finished writing a biographical novel about Mary, which will be published in February 2025. The best biographies of her, in my humble opinion, are Vindication, by Lyndall Gordon and Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, by Janet Todd. There are many others that are also very good, but I found those two to be the most thorough. Mary Wollstonecraft was such a complex figure. What I loved about her is discovering through my research and plotting/writing my novel is how she lived out the heroine's journey as defined by Maureen Murdock in her book, The Heroine's Journey (which I would highly recommend). Murdock lays alongside Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey the unique journey women make in their development throughout life. To me, Mary Wollstonecraft's life story validates Murdock's framework.
Hello! I am Christina from Melrose, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. I am a writer and avid traveler and book lover. Hmm, the last book about an audacious woman that I read is called Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, and it accompanies a mind-blowingly amazing exhibit of Varo's works that were featured at an Art Institute of Chicago exhibit last summer/fall. Varo is a mid-20th century surrealist painter who broke out from under her French poet lover's shadow when he left Mexico City to move back to Paris in the mid-1940s. Varos and Leonora Carrington were friends and helped lift each other up as artists and women.
One of my favorite books about audacious women is Beryl Markham's West With The Night, an autobiography by a British woman who grew up in Kenya and became one of the first--and most audacious!--women pilots.
Hello from Mainz, Germany! I’m currently teaching American studies at uni Mainz. I am reading Heroines by Kate Zambreno which is autotheory-ish and about the wives of famous modernist writers. I’m really enjoying it and slowly adding to my TBR list of audacious women. Speaking of Simone de Beauvoir elsewhere in the thread, Zambreno has a quote from Simone that I can’t stop thinking about that talks about how the violence of patriarchy often comes in the form of logic. Now my colleague and I are collecting moments of male logic that feel so frustrating and now we are noticing it everywhere.
Hi Anne and everyone,
I'm in central Wisconsin, which, unusually, had very little snow or cold weather this winter.
I've known Anne virtually for several years, since putting together the Nonfiction Fans page on Facebook, and I'm also a BIO member.
I'm currently reading Drew Gilpin Faust's memoir Necessary Trouble, which I love because it's by/about a woman who is a writer and a historian.
Thanks, Linda, for recommending the biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner. It sounds great.
hello from Southern California 🔆
Just read the Tove Jansson piece here — wonderful essay! And images — there were paintings there that I'd never seen before. One tiny correction — her parents were Finnish, not Swedish (they were members of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland).
Hello! I'm a former academic who lives in Sweden and now mostly writes. I'm not quite sure how I found your newsletter, but I'm glad that I did! Writing and art seem to be common themes to many of the substacks I've landed on.
Your nice invitation sent me to my own (newish) newsletter in a mild panic, to see what proportion of the writers whose work I've looked at were women. Am relieved to say that it's actually more women than men, in part because a full 5 of the 12 essays bounce off stories by Tove Jansson (Finnish writer and artist). It's so easy to end up being disproportionate the other way, if one isn't thinking about it consciously. (That's true even though I'm a woman.).
It's interesting about S de Beauvoir and J-P Sartre. As a teenager I was fascinated by their relationship, but I read him and found her hard to get into. Now have been thinking of looking again at her novel The Mandarins in case it resonates completely differently from an older perspective.
On Ursula LeGuin, I actually reread the Earthsea Books a few years ago for the first time since childhood. She's an incredible writer, of course. But my memory from childhood had been that the Earthsea books were cold, somehow. It was astonishing to reread them and see that they're actually literally cold, in the sense that the characters are often in cold places. Fascinating.
Oh — I just looked at the Audacious Women website and see that the piece on Tove Jansson is out from behind a paywall now! Will go and read it! That may be the piece that got me here, though I was only able to read the first couple of paragraphs then.
1. I’m in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I’ve lived since retiring as a professor of American literature. I have published a biography of the American poet Marianne Moore and am working on a group biography of the Stieglitz circle, which includes Georgia O’Keeffe and six other artists.
2. I know Anne through Biographers International Organization (BIO).
3. The last book I read about (and by) an audacious woman is Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra. It’s an outstanding biography of an amazing woman. It will go on sale later this month (March 2024). Highly recommend!
I am 61 years old and have lived in or near Canton, Ohio for my entire life. I was drawn to Anne’s writing about Constance Fenimore Woolson in 2016. My younger daughter had completed a National History Day paper about nearby Zoar, Ohio and was now working there in summers as a tour guide. Zoar was a “Separatist” community from 1817 through the 1890s. I was fascinated to learn Constance Fenimore Woolson traveled by train to Zoar on more than one occasion circa 1870 (roughy) and wrote of these experiences in Harpers Magazine. She even composed a short story, or perhaps more than one, about Zoar’s inhabitants.
Anne’s book about Woolson was my first-ever purchase of a digital book! When the New York Times reviewed the book quite favorably I was in awe of Anne.
In this discussion thread I’m fascinated by Anne’s mention of the “brain” relationship between de Beauvoir and Sartre. I also enjoy the mentions by Veenita and Jon above regarding women and the education they strove for. Although an aunt of mine born in 1927 didn’t face nearly the obstacles mentioned in the above posts, she nevertheless was determined enough to achieve a business degree in the 1940s and obtain the position of School District Treasurer, no doubt rare for a woman, which she held until her retirement.
My personal favorite audacious woman author can arguably be described as “from the past,” as she published her first novel in the 1970s. I find Lionel Shriver’s novels to be filled with bold voices. Whether women or men, her characters get right to the point, vividly! To mention two of her novels: “The Post-Birthday World” presents 2-part chapters which map out alternative scenarios for the protagonist depending on a choice she faced at a moment in time, then concludes with a 1-part-only chapter which plausibly ties each scenario to a common ending. Dazzling. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” presents a story I would never, ever want to read, ponder, or watch the news about. But because she wrote it, the novel mesmerized me.
1. Where in the world? Right now I am sitting in a cafe in Castlerock on the north coast of Northern Ireland, refuelling after a sensational couple of hours walking on the beach and cliff tops.
2. The literalist answer is ferry and car, but the reason is that my partner had a couple of days work at Queen’s University Belfast and we’ve tacked on a few days holiday.
3. Not exactly the last, but I got The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin for Christmas.
4. I already knew the books well, of course—she is my all time favourite writer. What was new, apart from the gorgeous illustrations, was the overall Introduction, and afterwords to each of the five books, which taught me a lot about her creative process. For instance, she drew the famous Earthsea map before she started writing, but had very little idea of where the story would go.
She says, “None of them (the first three books) was closely plotted or planned before writing; in each of them much of the story came to me as I followed what I wrote where it inevitably led.” Which makes me feel validated, as that's pretty much the way I write, and there are lots of people who are busy telling you you need to plot everything out beforehand.
Hello! I'll get us started. I'm in North Berwick, Scotland. I recently read Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre, by Hazel Rowley. I was fascinated by her many love affairs, particularly with Nelson Algren, and how her relationship with Sartre was intellectual rather than sexual (except for a brief period at the beginning).