In this book blending memoir, criticism, and biography, author and editor Joanna Biggs examines the unconventional paths of women writers across the centuries—their pursuits and achievements as well as their disappointments and hardships. Each chapter is dedicated to one writer and offers a glimpse into the writing lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. Biggs celebrates the ways in which these writers put their own lives into their writing, and how the choices they made enabled them to write, and keep going. “This book bears the traces of their struggles as well as my own—and some of the things we all found that help. Not all of the solutions they (and I) found worked, and even when they did, they didn’t work all of the time,” she writes. “But the answers might come in time if I could stay with the questions.”
