All of us remember our First Love. In this brilliant and often passionate book, Maria DiBattista shows that the yearning for the freshness of First Love, and the sadness of that yearning, are central to modern literature. DiBattista offers a sweeping and wholly original reinterpretation of modern fiction, allowing us to see the romantic affections that lie behind the seemingly most ironic of modernist texts.

DiBattista argues that modernity reinvented First Love as a myth of creative initiative, as its characteristic response to a pervasive sense of historical belatedness. Anxious that its own creations can never be more than diminished forms of mightier originals, modernity idolizes First Love as the beginning that can never be repeated. First Love hence epitomizes the dream of a new self-incarnation. From Turgenev's First Love to the formative works of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, E. M. Forster, and Vladimir Nabokov, First Love confirms the birth of an artistic vocation. For modern men and women intent on becoming the original authors of their own lives, First Love becomes paradigmatic of those life-altering moments that transform the undifferentiated sequence of days into a fateful narrative.

DiBattista focuses on the enunciation of First Love in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. In reading their works, DiBattista dramatically revises the accepted view of irony as the dominant tone of modernism. First Love constitutes, she shows, a new apprehension of the world characterized not by the frigid distances of irony but by a belief in the creative individual who may begin the world anew, as if for the first time.

In 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft drew upon her experiences as a governess as well as her understanding of the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to publish this popular collection of moral tales for children. Not surprisingly, the woman who would later write A Vindication of the Rights of Women had strong views on children's education. Wollstonecraft desired nothing less than liberating children, both girls and boys, from what she believed were irrational modes of education in late eighteenth-century European culture. Her hyper rational stories became influential models for expressing particular philosophies of education through children's literature.

This beautiful facsimile of the 1791 edition includes the original illustrations by William Blake. A commentary by Eileen Hunt Botting puts the text in context and hints at influences on Wollstonecraft's daughter Mary Shelley and the pedagogical philosophy behind Shelley's novel Frankenstein.
 
Like all volumes in the Women in Print series, Original Stories from Real Life is provided as an open access book and downloads to a wide variety of platforms and online e-readers.
 

Imagine being a young poet, nurturing your craft without the benefit of established mentors. Imagine having never been in a class taught by a woman poet or not having a bookshelf filled with books written by living women poets. Luckily, young women poets today don’t have to. Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker’s Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections collects both personal essays and representative poems by women born after 1960 whose careers were influenced—directly or indirectly—by the women who preceded them.

The poets in this collection describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical, less patriarchal, and less anxious than forms of mentorship in the past. Vivid and intelligent, these twenty-four essays explore the complicated nature of the mentoring relationship, with all its joys and difficulties, and show how this new sense of writing out of female experience and within a community of writers has fundamentally changed women’s poetry.

Includes:
Jenny Factor on Marilyn Hacker
Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel
Miranda Field on Fanny Howe
Katie Ford on Jorie Graham
Joy Katz on Sharon Olds
Valerie Martínez on Joy Harjo
Erika Meitner on Rita Dove
Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye
Eleni Sikelianos on Alice Notley
Tracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-Broido
Crystal Williams on Lucille Clifton
Rebecca Wolff on Molly Peacock