Zusatztext One of the most ceaselessly interesting books I've read in some time.Lorrie Moore! The New York Review of Books Informationen zum Autor Claudia Roth Pierpont, a contributor to The New Yorker since 1990, has received a Whiting Writer's Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance art history from New York University. She lives in New York City. Klappentext With a masterful ability to connect their social contexts to well-chosen and telling details of their personal lives! Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us portraits of twelve amazingly diverse and influential literary women of the twentieth century! women who remade themselves and the world through their art. Gertrude Stein! Mae West! Margaret Mitchell! Eudora Welty! Ayn Rand! Doris Lessing! Anais Nin! Zora Neale Hurston! Marina Tsvetaeva! Hannah Arendt and Mary Mccarthy! and Olive Schreiner: Pierpont is clear-eyed in her examination of each member of this varied group! connectng her subjects firmly to the issues of sexual freedom! race! and politics that bound them to their times! even as she exposes the roots of their uniqueness. "Pierpont['s] graceful essays are at once erudite and personal in their focus." ?The Boston Globe "One of the most ceaselessly interesting books I've read in some time." ?Lorrie Moore! The New York Review of Books Leseprobe Introduction T his book was conceived when two writers who seemed to embody entirely different concerns -- the South African "agnostic" novelist Olive Schreiner and the author of America's champion best-seller, Margaret Mitchell -- turned out to have a great deal in common. Born nearly half a century and half a world apart, both wrote about race and its place in the history of a bitterly divided country, about a time of difficult change from one era to the next, and about women who were too strong to fit into established feminine patterns. And both had an extraordinary effect on readers: in the 1880s, Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm was widely perceived as a spiritual bridge between Darwinian science and the need for God; in the mid-1930s and for a long time after, a significant number of Americans viewed the Civil War and Reconstruction -- with all their implications for the contemporary racial order -- as Mitchell had portrayed them in Gone with the Wind . Whatever the merits of their prose or their arguments, these women told stories that changed the way people thought and lived. Fascinated by this kind of naïve power -- both Schreiner's and Mitchell's books were first novels -- I began to consider other literary women of influence (very different from women of literary influence) whose domain is somewhat off the usual critical path. The resulting group is emphatically diverse; there is hardly a woman here who would not be scandalized to find herself in company with most of the others. Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein and Mae West, Doris Lessing and Anaïs Nin, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty, Marina Tsvetaeva and Mary McCarthy: what could they possibly have in common? Part of the excitement of working with such contrary figures lay in comparing their different versions of absolute truth: the individualism of Rand versus the Communism of Lessing, the ideal of sexual liberation in Mae West versus that of Nin or Lessing or McCarthy, the voice of the American South as heard by Hurston and by Welty. And yet, again, similarities began to emerge, not in what these women wrote but in how they contrived to get it written: that is, in how ambitious women worked out their destinies in an age of momentous transition for their sex, when -- to paraphrase Olive Schreiner on religious faith -- the old ways seemed outworn but new ones had not been invented. This book is organized into three sections within an overall (if elastic) chronological seq...

8220;One of the most ceaselessly interesting books I’ve read in some time.”–Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books

Autorentext

Claudia Roth Pierpont, a contributor to The New Yorker since 1990, has received a Whiting Writer's Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance art history from New York University. She lives in New York City.

Klappentext

With a masterful ability to connect their social contexts to well-chosen and telling details of their personal lives, Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us portraits of twelve amazingly diverse and influential literary women of the twentieth century, women who remade themselves and the world through their art.

Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, Marina Tsvetaeva, Hannah Arendt and Mary Mccarthy, and Olive Schreiner: Pierpont is clear-eyed in her examination of each member of this varied group, connectng her subjects firmly to the issues of sexual freedom, race, and politics that bound them to their times, even as she exposes the roots of their uniqueness.

"Pierpont['s] graceful essays are at once erudite and personal in their focus." ?The Boston Globe

"One of the most ceaselessly interesting books I've read in some time." ?Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books

Leseprobe
Introduction

T his book was conceived when two writers who seemed to embody entirely different concerns -- the South African "agnostic" novelist Olive Schreiner and the author of America's champion best-seller, Margaret Mitchell -- turned out to have a great deal in common. Born nearly half a century and half a world apart, both wrote about race and its place in the history of a bitterly divided country, about a time of difficult change from one era to the next, and about women who were too strong to fit into established feminine patterns. And both had an extraordinary effect on readers: in the 1880s, Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm was widely perceived as a spiritual bridge between Darwinian science and the need for God; in the mid-1930s and for a long time after, a significant number of Americans viewed the Civil War and Reconstruction -- with all their implications for the contemporary racial order -- as Mitchell had portrayed them in Gone with the Wind. Whatever the merits of their prose or their arguments, these women told stories that changed the way people thought and lived.

Fascinated by this kind of naïve power -- both Schreiner's and Mitchell's books were first novels -- I began to consider other literary women of influence (very different from women of literary influence) whose domain is somewhat off the usual critical path. The resulting group is emphatically diverse; there is hardly a woman here who would not be scandalized to find herself in company with most of the others. Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein and Mae West, Doris Lessing and Anaïs Nin, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty, Marina Tsvetaeva and Mary McCarthy: what could they possibly have in common? Part of the excitement of working with such contrary figures lay in comparing their different versions of absolute truth: the individualism of Rand versus the Communism of Lessing, the ideal of sexual liberation in Mae West versus that of Nin or Lessing or McCarthy, the voice of the American South as heard by Hurston and by Welty. And yet, again, similarities began to emerge, not in what these women wrote but in how they contrived to get it written: that is, in how ambitious women worked out their destinies in an age of momentous transition for their sex, when -- to paraphrase Olive Schreiner on religious faith -- the old ways seemed outworn but new ones had not been invented.

This book is organized into three sections within an overall (if elastic) chronological sequence. Broadly speaking, the first section deals with issues of sexual freedom (Schreiner, Stein, Nin, West), the second with race (Mitchell, Hurston, Welty), and the third with …