The Norton Book of Women's Lives

by Phyllis Rose

Overview

"This remarkable and wide-ranging collection, full of surprises, should encourage any woman who is trying to survive in a man's world, and enlighten any man who sincerely wants to understand contemporary women." —Alison Lurie

"This magnificent, handsome, handful of an anthology . . ."* includes sixty-one substantial selections from the twentieth-century literature of women's lives: autobiographies, journals, and memoirs. "As varied in humanity as in geography,"** the women whose life stories are collected here include the famous—Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf—and the surprising—Emma Mashinini, a black South African labor organizer; Onnie Lee Logan, an Alabama "granny" midwife; Sara Suleri, an expatriate in America who reflects hilariously on the language of food in her native Pakistan.

"Destined to become a classic,"‡ this treasury of women's lives, brimming with intelligence, passion, wit, and determination, is a celebration of life itself.

*Hungry Mind Review


**Washington Post Book World


‡Library Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393312904
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/17/1995
Pages:	832
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Phyllis Rose is the author of Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages and other noted works of biography and criticism. She is professor of English at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Editorial Reviews

"This is a book to be marooned with on a desert island. . . . A nourishing anthology . . . that covers an exhilarating range of experience."

Elle

Because of the breadth and richness of these 61 selections, which demonstrate the evolution of women's autobiographical writing, this anthology is destined to become a classic. Works of the famous, i.e., Helen Keller and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, are interspersed with those not publicly known. There are landmark passages from Anne Frank, Mary McCarthy, and Anais Nin, women whose names are synonymous with the diary form. Many passages represent the experiences of political activists like Bernadette Devlin. The collection is multicultural in scope, ranging, for example, from the poetry of Maya Angelou in the United States to the oral autobiography of Nisa, an African tribal member. The emphasis is upon experience rather than literary quality, resulting in the inclusion of passages not readily available elsewhere. The selections are alphabetically arranged, and the introductory material about each author helpfully refers the reader to related passages. Recommended for public and academic library collections.-- Mary Ellen Beck, Troy P.L., N.Y.

Library Journal