- The Adams Women
- Paul C. Nagel
- From his vast storehouse of knowledge about the Adams family, Nagel pulls out the feminine threads of that tapestry to write all about the Adams women, from Abigail to daughter Nabby, from Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of John Quincy, to Clover Adams, wife of Henry, with others making more than cameo appearances.
- Paperback 1999
- Alice Hamilton
- Barbara Sicherman
- Alice Hamilton was first considered "subversive" during World War I, yet she lived to protest our involvement in Vietnam. She was America's foremost industrial toxicologist, a pioneer in medicine and in social reform, long-time resident of Hull House, pacifist and civil libertarian. She was Edith Hamilton's sister, and the first woman on the faculty of Harvard, though she retired--an assistant professor in the school of public health--ten years before women medical students were admitted. This legendary figure now comes to life in an integrated work of biography and letters
- Hardcover 1984 / Paperback
- Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale
- Florence Nightingale
- Edited by Martha Vicinus
- Edited by Bea Nergaard
- For many, Florence Nightingale is the most famous woman of her day, second only perhaps to Queen Victoria. Celebrated and beloved by the public and her friends, considered an irritant by politicians and bureaucrats, the great reformer remains a figure of considerable controversy. In this full 'life in letters' we see her at first hand. Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard weave together a narrative account and a selection of her letters in such a way as to create--in Nightingale's own words--a fascinating portrayal of the woman, her career, and her concerns.
- Hardcover 1990
- Famous Women
- Giovanni Boccaccio
- Translated by Virginia Brown
- The first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women, Famous Women affords a fascinating glimpse of a moment in history when medieval attitudes toward women were beginning to give way to more modern views of their potential.
- Paperback 2003
- Fanny Kemble's Journals
- Fanny Kemble
- Edited by Catherine Clinton
- Henry James called Fanny Kemble's autobiography "one of the most animated autobiographies in the language." Born into the first family of the British stage, Fanny Kemble was one of the most famous woman writers of the English-speaking world, a best-selling author on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to her essays, poetry, plays, and a novel, Kemble published six works of memoir, eleven volumes in all, covering her life, which began in the first decade of the nineteenth century and ended in the last. Her autobiographical writings are compelling evidence of Kemble's wit and talent, and they also offer a dazzling overview of her transatlantic world.
- Paperback 2000 / Hardcover 2000
- First Lady of the Confederacy
- Joan E. Cashin
- When Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy, his wife, Varina Howell Davis, reluctantly became the First Lady. Pro-slavery but also pro-Union, Varina Davis was inhibited by her role as Confederate First Lady and unable to reveal her true convictions.Cashin offers a splendid portrait of a fascinating woman who struggled with the constraints of her time and place.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
- Freda Kirchwey
- Sara Alpern
- Freda Kirchwey was a salient figure in twentieth-century America, a beacon for liberals and activists of her era. A journalist with The Nation from 1918 to 1955--owner, editor, and publisher after 1937--she was an advocate of advanced ideas about sexual freedom and birth control and a tireless foe of fascism. The quintessential new woman, she combined a private and highly visible public life. In this full-scale biography of Kirchwey, Alpern weaves the strands of gender-related issues with larger social explorations.
- Hardcover 1987
- Hypatia of Alexandria
- Maria Dzielska
- Translated by F. Lyra
- Hypatia--brilliant mathematician, eloquent Neoplatonist, and a woman renowned for her beauty--was brutally murdered by a mob of Christians in Alexandria in 415. She has been a legend ever since. In this engrossing book, Maria Dzielska searches behind the legend to bring us the real story of Hypatia's life and death, and new insight into her colorful world.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
- Harriet A. Jacobs
- Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin
- John S. Jacobs, Contributor
- This enlarged edition of the most significant and celebrated slave narrative now completes the Jacobs family saga, surely one of the most memorable in all of American history. John Jacobs's short slave narrative, "A True Tale of Slavery," published in London in 1861, adds a brother's perspective to Harriet Jacobs's own autobiography. It is an exciting addition to this now classic work, as John Jacobs presents additional historical information about family life so well described already by his sister.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2000
- The Invention of Jane Harrison
- Mary Beard
- Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) is the most famous female Classicist in history, the author of books that revolutionized our understanding of Greek culture and religion. This lively and innovative portrayal of a fascinating woman raises the question of who wins (and how) in the competition for academic fame. Questioning the common criteria for identifying intellectual "influence" and "movements," Mary Beard exposes the mythology that is embedded in the history of Classics. At the same time she provides a vivid picture of a sparkling intellectual scene.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- Jane Austen
- Tony Tanner
- Tanner guides us through Austen's novels from relatively sunny early works to the darker, more pessimistic Persuasion and fragmentary Sanditon--a journey that takes her from acceptance of a society maintained by landed property, family, money, and strict propriety through an insistence on the need for authentication of these values to a final skepticism and even rejection. In showing her progress from a parochial optimism to an ability to encompass her whole society, Tanner renews our sense of Jane Austen as one of the great novelists, confirming both her local and abiding relevance.
- Hardcover 1987 / Paperback
- The Journals of Claire Clairmont
- Claire Clairmont
- The diaries of Clairmont are, so far as is known, the last of the major documents of the Shelley-Byron circle to be published. Only the writings of the Shelleys themselves surpass hers in importance for those interested in the careers of the poets and their friends. Best known as Byron's mistress and the mother of his daughter Allegra, "Claire," as she preferred to be called, is important to literary history for her role in bringing Byron and Shelley together.
- Hardcover 1968
- Letter to the World
- Susan Ware
- Susan Ware deftly chronicles the professional and private lives of seven notable American women of our century. She shows how the creation or re-creation of their personae was an essential element in their success, whether they craved fame or chose a different lifestyle. All seven women chose to live exceptional and unconventional lives, offering other women examples of the ability to live beyond the limits imposed by society or family, to dream and strive, to be independent and fulfilled.
- Paperback 2000
- Letters of Emily Dickinson
- Emily Dickinson
- Edited by Thomas H. Johnson
- Hardcover
- Letters to Molly
- John Millington Synge
- Edited by Ann Saddlemyer
- When Synge and Molly Allgood fell in love, he was thirty-five, she nineteen. Neither knew that he had Hodgkin's disease and would die in three years. Seldom able to be alone together, they wrote letters almost daily. Synge's letters--hers do not survive--are a poignant record of a love that was foredoomed.
- Hardcover 1971 / Paperback 1984
- The Life of Emily Dickinson
- Richard B. Sewall
- Winner of the National Book Award, this massively detailed biography throws a light into the study of the brilliant poet. How did Emily Dickinson, from the small window over her desk, come to see a life that included the horror, exaltation and humor that lives her poetry? With abundance and impartiality, Sewall shows us not just the poet nor the poetry, but the woman and her life.
- Paperback 1998
- The Murder of Regilla
- Sarah B. Pomeroy
- Born to an illustrious Roman family in 125 BCE, Regilla was married at the age of fifteen to Herodes, a wealthy Roman. Twenty years later--and eight months pregnant with her sixth child--Regilla died under mysterious circumstances, after a blow to the abdomen delivered by Herodes's freedman. Though Herodes was charged, he was acquitted. Pomeroy's investigation suggests that despite Herodes's erection of numerous monuments to his deceased wife, he was in fact guilty of the crime.
- Hardcover 2007
- My Dearest Friend
- With a Foreword by Joseph J. Ellis
- Abigail Adams
- John Adams
- Edited by Margaret A. Hogan
- Edited by C. James Taylor
- Foreword by Joseph J. Ellis
- In 1762, John Adams penned a flirtatious note to "Miss Adorable," the 17-year-old Abigail Smith. In 1801, Abigail wrote to wish her husband John a safe journey as he headed home to Quincy after serving as president of the nation he helped create. The letters that span these nearly forty years form the most significant correspondence--and reveal one of the most intriguing and inspiring partnerships--in American history.
- Hardcover 2007
- Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, 1-3, 1607-1950
- Edited by Edward T. James
- Edited by Janet Wilson James
- Edited by Paul Boyer
- This superb biographical dictionary covers the lives of exceptional women throughout three and a half centuries of American history. Here are artists, lawyers, reformers, educators, entrepreneurs, physicists, writers, pioneers, presidents' ladies, film stars. Here are those known for their deeds and those famed for their looks--the genteel and the disreputable, the highborn and slave-born. Here are the famous in all areas of endeavor. Here also are many names rescued from obscurity.
- Hardcover 1971 / Paperback
- Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, 4, The Modern Period
- Edited by Barbara Sicherman
- Edited by Carol Hurd Green
- The life stories of American women--442 of them--who have in some way affected contemporary American life are explored in this lauded companion to Notable American Women, 1607-1950. The basics--the crucial dates, ancestry, parents, education, marital status, and children--provide invaluable material for both the researcher and the general reader. Beyond these essentials, a brief essay focuses on each woman's life and personality, and evaluates her career from a historical framework. Sixteen new pages of photographs specially selected for the paperback edition have been included.
- Paperback
- Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, 5, Completing the Twentieth Century
- Edited by Susan Ware
- Stacy Braukman, Assistant Editor
- This latest volume brings the project up to date, with entries on almost 500 women whose death dates fall between 1976 and 1999. You will find here stars of the golden ages of radio, film, dance, and television; scientists and scholars; civil rights activists and religious leaders; Native American craftspeople and world-renowned artists. For each subject, the volume offers a biographical essay by a distinguished authority that integrates the woman's personal life with her professional achievements set in the context of larger historical developments.
- Hardcover 2005
- On Long Winter Nights
- Hinde Bergner
- Edited and translated by Justin Daniel Cammy
- In this intimate memoir of a young Jewish woman's adolescence and life in a nineteenth century Eastern European shtetl, Hinde Bergner recalls the gradual impact of modernization on a traditional world as she finds herself caught between her thirst for a European education, true love, and the expectations of her traditional family.
- Paperback 2005 / Hardcover 2005
- One First Love
- Ellen Louisa (Emerson) Tucker
- Edited by Edith W. Gregg
- Letters, poems, and fragments of a journal are the only first-hand reflection we have of a personality of major importance in the life of Emerson, that of the beautiful and gifted Ellen Louisa Tucker, whom he married in 1829. The depth and transforming effect on him of their happy love is a universally acknowledged biographical fact, as is the tragic, shattering effect of her early death in 1831.
- Hardcover 1962
- One Writer's Beginnings
- Eudora Welty
- Eudora Welty, whose many honors include the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for fiction, tells the story of her early life and offers guidance for those who aspire to write fiction. Now available as an audio CD, in Welty's own voice, or as a book.
- Paperback 1998 / CD-audio 2004 / Hardcover
- One Writer's Beginnings
- Eudora Welty
- Eudora Welty, whose many honors include the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for fiction, tells the story of her early life and offers guidance for those who aspire to write fiction. Now available as an audio CD, in Welty's own voice, or as a book.
- Paperback 1998 / CD-audio 2004 / Hardcover
- The Passion of Emily Dickinson
- Judith Farr
- In a profound new analysis of Dickinson's life and work, Judith Farr explores the desire, suffering, exultation, spiritual rapture, and intense dedication to art that characterize Dickinson's poems, deciphering their many complex and witty references to texts and paintings of the day. In Farr's analysis, the poet emerges not as a cryptic proto-modern or a victim of female repression but as a cultivated mid-Victorian in whom the romanticism of Emerson and the American landscape painters found bold expression.
- Hardcover 1992 / Paperback 1998
- Sappho's Immortal Daughters
- Margaret Williamson
- This book is a search for Sappho through the poetry she wrote, the culture she inhabited, and the myths that have arisen around her. It is an expert and thoroughly engaging introduction to one of the most enduring and enigmatic figures of antiquity.
- Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1998
- Sor Juana
- Octavio Paz
- Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
- Mexico's leading poet, essayist, and cultural critic writes of a Mexican poet of another time and another world, the world of seventeenth-century New Spain. His subject is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the most striking figure in all of Spanish-American colonial literature and one of the great poets of her age.
- Hardcover 1988 / Paperback 1990
- Wang Kuo-wei
- Joey Bonner
- In this biography of the brilliant and multifaceted Chinese scholar Wang Kuo-wei, Bonner throws important light on the range and course of ideas in early twentieth-century China. Pursuing her subject across the whole spectrum of his many scholarly interests, Bonner critically examines Wang's essays on German philosophy and philosophical aesthetics; his poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetic theory; and his works on ancient Chinese history, particularly of the Shang dynasty.
- Hardcover 1986