4 comments


  • Thanks for the post! I try to find clips from movies about writers to show the “writing life” but don’t have any clips about women writers (although there are interesting depictions of women journalists in movies….)

    I think there’s a movie about Beatrix Potter out there (I haven’t seen it) — probably not the writer you are looking for, but it may be interesting (I loved Beatrix Potter when I was a kid!)

    June 02, 2013
  • Felicity

    I have some suggestions!

    First of all, Lucy M. Boston, children’s writer, British. My mom has read her two memoirs which are collected as Memories, and likes them very much. She was also a painter, a gardener, and a fascinating person, reportedly cheerful to the very end if her long life.

    Secondly, Rumer Godden, who wrote adult & children’s lit. She has two memoirs which my mom has liked, and there’s a biography by Anne Chisholm that neither of us has read.

    How about P.D. James, whose mysteries are more accepted as “literary” than anyone I can think of? There was a recent memoir, Time to Be in Earnest, which I’ve heard was very good.

    I don’t know that there’s any bio of Josephine Tey, who was very private, but then she did only make it to 56 (cancer.) I love her books.

    Too many Brits? How about Eudora Welty? Lived to a ripe old age, and I hear she was a happy, sociable person.

    Toni Morrison? She seems busy as a bee, but I have never heard that her personal life is tragic at all.

    June 02, 2013
  • Jennifer Drake Thornton

    If you accept Jo March as a very lightly fictionalized version of Louisa May Alcott, she comes off pretty well in film. But that is reaching quite a ways back.

    June 03, 2013
  • I’ve got a long list of women writers who have made it deep into adulthood with great books and good relationships. I’ll abbreviate, but continue thinking about this list, if you want more examples.

    Margaret Drabble, Byatt’s sister, has had a very calm life, aside from spats with her sister.

    On this side of the pond: Gail Godwin, Marge Piercy, . . . I’m seeing a trend. I think that women writers who were part of the feminist movement and/or started writing after the feminist movement have less of the drama of the Sylvia Plaths and the Zelda Fitzgeralds.

    I also think that medical and mental health advances of recent decades give more of us a shot at living longer, more productive lives. The odds were really stacked against women of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Penicillin and reliable birth control have really been more precious gifts than many of us realize.

    June 04, 2013

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