The Norton Book of Women’s Lives – Phyllis Rose (ed)

I read this book already over the summer, started this review and for some reason left it unfinished. I decided to finish it and post it anyway, for two reasons. The first is that I am participating in the “In Their Shoes” Challenge for which the participants read memoirs or (auto)biographies and this post might be a good source of inspiration for other participants. The second reason is very simple: I loved this book!! I was sorry to turn the last page. It is one of the most interesting books I’ve read recently (I seem to be on a roll recently when it comes to good books).

The book consists of excerpts of 20th century women’s autobiographies ranging in length from five to twenty pages. Usually I am not too keen on collections of fragments of different authors, but this one is different. I read it from beginning till end, like you read a novel. I don’t like dipping in and out of a book, reading chapters when I feel like it. There were maybe a handful of excerpts that I was glad they ended when they did, but of by far most I wouldn’t have minded a couple more pages.

Though at least half if not more of the women are from the US, this didn’t really bother me, as within this group the diversity was so big, ranging from the daughter of a museum director to African-American civil rights’ activists from a poor Southern family.

Probably half of the featured women were unknown to me, and many of those that I had heard of were on my one-day-I-want-to-read-this-author list. This book definitely whetted my appetite for more. The featured women are not all writers by profession, though they all had diaries or autobiographies published from which the excertps were taken. The women that I would like to read more by/about are:

Maya Angelou
Nina Berberova
Vera Brittain
Emilie Carles
Nien Cheng
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Jill Ker Conway
Bernadette Devlin
Annie Dillard
Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen (I read “Out of Africa” when I was 14 or 15, might be time for a reread)
Marguerite Duras (her diaries seem especially interesting; the fragment in the book was about her work in the French Resistance during the Second World War)
M.F.K. Fisher
Janet Frame
Evgenia S. Ginzburg (her memoires of the Stalin era have been on my want-to-read list for a long time)
Natalia Ginzburg
Vivian Gornick
Emily Hahn
Le Ly Hayslip
Eva Hoffman (Note to self: if I am not mistaken I have a book about Eastern-Europe by Hoffman in my library in Holland. Will have to look for that when I am there in January).
Zora Neale Hurston
Helen Keller
Maxine Hong Kingston (There was an interesting essay by her in a book on intercultural communications that I read earlier this year)
Onnie Lee Logan
Audre Lorde (I first heard of her through Margaret, and after read the fragment in this book she’s definitely secured her place on the list)
Beryl Markham
Emma Mashinini
Margaret Mead
Jessica Mitford (I hope to get the biography of the Mitford sisters when I am in Holland in January)
Anne Moody
Cynthia Ozick
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Vita Sackville-West
Kate Simon
Sophia Tolstoy (the wife of Lev Tolstoy, the great Russian writer)
Marie Vassiltchikov
Virginia Woolf
That makes 36 out of the 59 women featured in the book, a nice addition to my wishlist.

Do go explore these links, it’s worth spending the time on that! If any of you have any suggestions as to what to read by or about these women, please leave a comment.