Literary Archives - Page 36 of 36

Divna Veković

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.

Madame d’Aulnoy

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

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

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

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

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 Coolbrith

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.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories to nonfiction. Her best-known works include Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) – which was adapted into a 2013 film – short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), Americanah (2013), We Should All Be Feminists (2014) and Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017).
She was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2008.

Sarah Prideaux

Sarah Prideaux was a bookbinder, teacher, historian and author of books about binding and illustration. Along with Katharine Adams (one of her students, and a close friend) and Sybil Pye, she was one of the noted women bookbinders of the period.
In 1888, at age 35 she started learning bookbinding, later studying in Paris. For several years she experimented, wrote articles and produced bound books inspired by Art Nouveau designs, with her work shown in various exhibits. By 1894, bindings bearing her signature were of professional quality. It has since been discovered that although she designed the bindings, selected the leather and marbled endpapers to a very detailed specification, the actual bookbinding was carried out by a French tradesman, Lucien Broca, and possibly others under her name. More than 276 books were bound and published under her signature.
As an expert on the history of bookbinding, Prideaux taught, lectured, and wrote reviews and articles for journals and magazines throughout the 1890s. These articles were collected and published as Bookbinders and their Craft. Her other books included Modern Bookbindings Their Design and Decoration and Aquatint Engraving A Chapter in the History of Book Illustration. She served as one of the directors of the Women’s Printing Society.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner was an English musicologist, novelist and poet, known for works such as the novels Lolly Willowes and After the Death of Don Juan, the poetry collection Whether a Dove or a Seagull and several short story collections. She also served in the Red Cross during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.