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Nine Women Writers Begin Again
by Joanna Biggs
A piercing blend of memoir, criticism, and biography examining how women writers across the centuries carved out intellectual freedom for themselves—and how others might do the same.
I took off my wedding ring for the last time—a gold band with half a line of "Morning Song" by Sylvia Plath etched inside—and for weeks afterwards, my thumb would involuntarily reach across my palm for the warm bright circle that had gone. I didn't fling the ring into the long grass, like women do in the movies, but a feeling began bubbling up nevertheless, from my stomach to my throat: it could fling my arms out. I was free...
A few years into her marriage and feeling societal pressure to surrender to domesticity, Joanna Biggs found herself longing for a different kind of existence. Was this all there was? She divorced without knowing what would come next.
Newly untethered, Joanna returned to the free-spirited writers of her youth and was soon reading in a fever—desperately searching for evidence of lives that looked more like her own, for the messiness and freedom, for a possible blueprint for intellectual fulfillment.
In A Life of One's Own, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante are all taken down from their pedestals, their work and lives seen in a new light. Joanna wanted to learn more about the conditions these women needed to write their best work, and how they addressed the questions she herself was struggling with: Is domesticity a trap? Is life worth living if you have lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman? Why is it so important for women to read one another?
This is a radical and intimate examination of the unconventional paths these women took—their pursuits and achievements but also their disappointments and hardships. And in exploring the things that gave their lives the most meaning, we find fuel for our own singular intellectual paths.
"[A] finely tuned blend of memoir, literary criticism, and biography...The sharp analysis and biographical sketches testify to how literature has long served as a site of reinvention for women: 'The ultimate freedom might be to take the wreckage of your life and write your own story with it.' Book lovers will swoon over this smart meditation on life and writing." —Publishers Weekly
"In this trenchant and wide-ranging book, Biggs writes about starting over after divorce while seeking wisdom from a canon of great female authors. In Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, George Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Ferrante and others, Biggs finds inspiration, advice and cautionary tales that shade her experience." —New York Times ("19 Works of Nonfiction to Read This Spring")
"A moving biblio-memoir that's a gift to readers of all ages, especially those in midlife who want to stroll down the memory lane of their formative reading experiences. The book's engaging, breezy chapters explore each subject's life and writings in chronological order ... A Life of One's Own has much to offer readers new to its subjects ... [Biggs] has learned a lesson from these writers she's long looked up to, for better and for worse. The book ends with her realization that she ought to 'let go of them and become the author of my own life.' She encourages her readers to do the same, cheering us on with the last words, 'You can too.'" —Washington Post
"A Life of One's Own is itself the writerly achievement [Biggs] had hoped for, which means that the larger story of her absorbing, eccentric book is the story of how she came to write it ... There is, of course, another sort of yearning here; alongside Biggs's search for a way to be a woman apart from being a wife is her search for a way to be a writer apart from being a critic. On the evidence of A Life of One's Own, she has found it." —The New Yorker
This information about A Life of One's Own was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joanna Biggs is an editor at Harper's Magazine. Previously an editor at the London Review of Books, she has written for The New Yorker, The Nation, Financial Times, and the Guardian, among other places. In 2017 she cofounded Silver Press, a London based feminist publishing house. She lives in New York.
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