As a Chilean author and educator, Gabriela Mistral became the first Latin American author to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. She boldly advocated for the rights of women, children, the poor, and many other disadvantaged groups in her community.
Zora Hurston was a world-renowned writer and anthropologist. Hurston’s novels, short stories, and plays often depicted African American life in the South. Her work in anthropology examined black folklore. Hurston influenced many writers, forever cementing her place in history as one of the foremost female writers of the 20th century.
Writer, performer and journalist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette is best known for her 1944 novella Gigi.
Divna Veković was the first female medical doctor in Montenegro. In addition to serving as a physician during World War I, she continued her work as a medical doctor until her death prior the end of World War II. Veković was also a humanitarian and a literary translator who was the first to translate the well-known Montenegrin poem and play The Mountain Wreath (also known as The Mountain of Wreath) from Serbian into French. Veković also translated other poems such as the work of the Serbian poet Jovan Jovanović Zmaj.
Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville was a French writer known for her literary fairy tales and for coining the term when she called her works contes de fées (fairy tales). In 1666, she was married off at age 15 to a man three times her age, the Baron d’Aulnoy. In 1669, the Baron was accused of treason by two men who may have been the 19-year-old baroness’s lovers, and her mother, the Marchioness de Gadagne. The Baron spent three years in the Bastille before he finally convinced the court of his innocence. His two male accusers were executed and the Marchioness de Gadagne fled to England. Though a warrant was served for Madame d’Aulnoy’s arrest, she escaped through a window and hid in a church when officers came to arrest her.
She may have then worked as a spy for France (and possibly spent some time in Holland, Spain, and England) before returning to Paris in 1685 (possibly as repayment for spying). Madame d’Aulnoy hosted salons that were attended by leading aristocrats and princes.
In 1699, her friend Angélique Ticquet was beheaded for having a servant shoot Angélique’s abusive husband. The servant was hanged. Mme d’Aulnoy escaped prosecution despite her alleged involvement and removed herself from the Paris social scene for 20 years.
D’Aulnoy published 12 books, including two collections of fairy tales and three “historical” novels, as well as a series of travel memoirs based on her supposed travels through court life in Madrid and London. Though her stories may have been plagiarized and invented, these stories later became her most popular works. In France and England at the time her works were considered as mere entertainment rather than factual history, a sentiment reflected in the reviews of the period. Her truly accurate attempts at historical accounts – about the Dutch wars of Louis XIV – were less successful. The money she made from her writing helped support her three daughters, not all of whom were produced during her time with the Baron d’Aulnoy .
Her most popular works were the fairy tales and adventure stories she published in Les Contes des Fées (Tales of fairies) and Contes Nouveaux, ou Les Fées à la Mode. Unlike the folk tales of the Grimm Brothers (born some 135 years later than d’Aulnoy), she wrote her stories in a conversational tone, as they might be told in salons. Many of her stories created a world of animal brides and grooms, where love and happiness came to heroines after overcoming great obstacles, though many English adaptations are very different from the original.
Anna Sewell was an English novelist who wrote the 1877 novel Black Beauty, her only published work, which is now considered one of the top ten best selling novels for children, although it was originally intended for an adult audience. She died just five months after Black Beauty’s publication, having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success.
Julia Peterkin was an American author who won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Novel/Literature for her novel Scarlet Sister Mary. She wrote several novels about the plantation South, especially the African-American Gullah people of the Lowcountry. She was one of the few white authors of her time to write about the African-American experience.
Katharine Susannah Prichard was an Australian author and co-founding member of the Communist Party of Australia. Over her more than 50-year career, she published novels, volumes of poetry and short story collections.
Mercedes de Acosta was an American poet, playwright, and novelist who wrote almost a dozen plays, only four of which were produced, and she published a novel and three volumes of poetry. She was professionally unsuccessful but is known for her social connections, including her many lesbian relationships with famous Broadway and Hollywood personalities and many friendships with prominent artists of the period.
Ina Donna Coolbrith was an American poet, writer and librarian, prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community. Called the “Sweet Singer of California”, she was the first California Poet Laureate, as well as the first poet laureate of any U.S. state.