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To anyone reading this, hello! It’s officially Women’s History Month (hooray!!!). For Women’s History Month, I wanted to write about female authors. As a book nerd, I’ve read many books in my life, by authors of all genders. However, most of them have been women authors. Even my favorite author is a female! Getting back on track, I wanted to write about famous female authors, specifically ones that didn’t stick to the mold; female authors who broke the gender norms developed during their times. Here is the list I came up with:
Mary Shelley is the famous author of the novel Frankenstein. She was born to William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. If Wollstonecraft sounds familiar to you, it’s because she had great pride as a defender of women’s rights. While she may have died only days after Shelley’s birth, her daughter followed in her footsteps of breaking Victorian traditions. At only 16 years old, Shelley eloped with poet Percy Shelley, who was married to another woman at that time. Their marriage was a very scandalous thing for young women to do, yet Shelley didn’t listen to society’s opinion too often. The event that caused Shelley to write her famous novel was a ghost story competition, proposed by Lord Byron. Frankenstein is known as one of the first science-fiction pieces ever written,
Jane Austen is an author I recently got into- I read her novel Pride and Prejudice for the first time this year. During her life, Austen wrote six novels: Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. Austen was born to George and Cassandra Austen, who made sure to circulate her writing even from a young age. Austen’s style of writing was ahead of her time and an important beginning for the literary realism movement. Even now, most literature courses cannot discuss modern literature without delving into Austen.
Now, I have to admit something: I’ve never read Woolf’s books before. However, after learning more about her, I will definitely be picking up her novel Orlando, based on her partner, Vita Sackville West. Woolf was born to Leslie and Julia Stephen; Leslie Stephen is actually the inventor of the Oxford Dictionary of Biography. Woolf’s novels captured the world around her, from the change in gender roles to the invention of cars and airplanes. Woolf wasn’t interested in patriarchal honors or degrees and instead continued to write about women’s positions in society. Woolf’s relationship with her husband was interesting; Woolf had no attraction to the opposite sex, and her husband Leonard knew this, yet they still got married. Their marriage was more platonic than it was romantic, with the two supporting each other’s literature journey. Even though Woolf began a relationship with Vita Sackville West, the two stayed married to each other.