Outsiders : : Five Women Writers who Changed the World
Book - 2019 800.922 Go, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / General / Gordon, Lyndall 3 On Shelf No requests on this item
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Call Number: 800.922 Go, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / General / Gordon, Lyndall
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Pittsfield Branch, Traverwood Branch
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Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout |
800.922 Go | 4-week checkout | On Shelf |
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout |
Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / General / Gordon, Lyndall | 4-week checkout | On Shelf |
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout |
Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / General / Gordon, Lyndall | 4-week checkout | On Shelf |
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Virago Press. First published in the United States in 2019 by John Hopkins University Press.
Copyright © Lyndall Gordon 2017, 2019
Includes index.
Contents: List of illustrations -- Foreword -- 1. Prodigy - Mary Shelley -- 2. Visionary - Emily Brontë -- 3. 'Outlaw' - George Eliot -- 4. Orator - Olive Schreiner -- 5. Explorer - Virginia Woolf -- The Outsiders Society -- Sources -- Further reading -- Acknowledgements -- Index.
Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf: they all wrote dazzling books that forever changed the way we see history. In "Outsiders", award-winning biographer Lyndall Gordon shows how these five novelists shared more than talent. In a time when a woman's reputation was her security, each of these women lost hers. They were unconstrained by convention, writing against the grain of their contemporaries, prophetically imagining a different future. We have long known the individual greatness of each of these writers, but in linking their creativity to their lives as outcasts, Gordon throws new light on the genius they share. All five lost their mothers in childbirth or at a young age. With no female role model present, they learned from books - and sometimes from an enlightened mentor. Crucially, each had to imagine what a woman could be in order to invent a voice of her own. The passion in their own lives infused their fiction. Writing with passionate intelligence of her own, Gordon reveals that these renegade writers inspired a new breed of women who wished to change a world locked in war, violence, exploitation and sexual abuse. Gordon's biographies have always shown the indelible connection between life and art: an intuitive, exciting and revealing approach that has been highly praised. In "Outsiders", she crafts nuanced portraits of Shelley, Brontë, Eliot, Schreiner and Woolf, naming each of these writers as prodigy, visionary, 'outlaw,' orator and explorer, and shows how they came, they saw and they left us changed. Today, following the tsunami of women's protest at wide-spread abuse, we do more than read them; we listen and live with their astonishing bravery and eloquence. -- inside cover.
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PUBLISHED
Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Year Published: 2019
Description: 338 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Language: English
Format: Book
ISBN/STANDARD NUMBER
9781421429441
1421429446
ADDITIONAL CREDITS
Johns Hopkins University.
SUBJECTS
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, -- 1797-1851.
Eliot, George, -- 1819-1880.
Brontë, Emily, -- 1818-1848.
Schreiner, Olive, -- 1855-1920.
Woolf, Virginia, -- 1882-1941.
Women authors -- Biography.