BOOKISH BROADS: Women Who Wrote Themselves Into History. By Lauren Marino. Illustrated by Alexandra Kilburn. Abrams Image. 192 pages. $19.99.
In “Bookish Broads,” author Lauren Marino (“What Would Dolly Do?”) offers thoughtful profiles of more than 50 of the most influential female writers of the past 1,000 years, from Lady Murasaki Shikibu and Julian of Norwich to Jane Austen and Mary Shelley to Octavia Butler and Judy Blume. In doing so, Marino pays tribute to women who have helped forged the literary and historical path on which we now walk.
Each featured writer is represented with a brief biography, a striking portrait by artist Alexandra Kilburn and a recommended bibliography — with a sprinkling of inspirational quotes throughout.
Marino’s book enlightens, entertains and empowers by bringing women’s literature to the forefront and contextualizing these writers in the larger historical conversations which shaped their work and which their work reshaped. “Bookish Broads” includes authors beloved by generations and celebrated in classrooms, like Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Harper Lee and Maya Angelou, about whom Marino offers new insights.
While some women writers have received recognition for their contributions, many more have slipped into our collective periphery. Marino explores how and why writers like Aemilia Bassano Lanyer and Eileen Chang are not household names and gives opportunity to expand our view of literature through these reintroductions.
Marino’s chronicle of women wordsmiths invites readers to better appreciate the influence of past writers on their modern counterparts and to embrace a more inclusive, global view of the female experience and its path-breaking storytellers.
Intended as representative and not comprehensive, “Bookish Broads” nonetheless includes women from different eras, nations, races, religions, sexualities, social statuses and genres to illustrate their diverse vantage points, as well as the struggles they overcame to be heard and valued as women and as artists. In desiring or demanding a voice for themselves, these women helped give others their own literary voices as well.
Many of Marino’s featured authors, such as Aphra Behn, Charlotte Lennox and Zora Neale Hurston, used their work to elevate and explore the female experience. These writers and others throughout “Bookish Broads” created new models of female characters, giving them agency, complexity and rich inner lives. By doing so, these writers validated the experiences of women and the oppressive challenges they faced, both at the time of publication and still today.
Marino also highlights categorical groups of writers, such as medieval mystics and children’s authors, showcasing the transcending similarities between these writers as well as the myriad paths to authorship.
In telling the stories of this pantheon of influential women, Marino empowers burgeoning writers to follow their own creative yearnings and calls upon readers to honor those who have come before us. Each of these life stories is different, affirming that writers and artists can come from everywhere.
None of these women lived or created without some measure of strife or sorrow, but all of them found purpose in the act of storytelling, and their words, ambitions, and ideals resonate in the work of all women writers who will follow.
It is easy to categorize many of these women as being ahead of their time, but Marino’s book offers an important alternative: these revolutionary writers were needed in their times because they helped change the eras in which they wrote. “Bookish Broads” illuminates the transformative legacy of women writers and invites us to join a story still unfolding.
"Review" - Google News
March 28, 2021 at 05:00PM
https://ift.tt/3rv0q2a
Review: Illustrated profiles of women wordsmiths enlightens and empowers - Charleston Post Courier
"Review" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YqLwiz
https://ift.tt/3c9nRHD
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Review: Illustrated profiles of women wordsmiths enlightens and empowers - Charleston Post Courier"
Post a Comment