Results by title
1296 books match the query 'Women authors' and 13 start with j
Jagadamba
The Kasturba StoryRamdas Bhatkal
Seagull Books, 2016
Originally conceived in the Marathi language for actress Rohini Hattangadi, who received an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of Kasturba in Richard Attenborough’s classic biopic Gandhi, this play charts the journey of a simple girl who went on to become “Jagadamba,” or the “Universal Mother,” as the wife of the Mahatma.
As Shanta Ghokale writes in her introduction: “Wives of great men have hard lives, often lived in negation of values they hold most dear. Jagadamba is the personal feelings of a devoted wife who had held her own in a life made mentally, physically, and morally turbulent by her husband’s ideas and political work.”
Jalousie
Allyson Paty
Tupelo Press, 2025
The “I-centered,” first person, yet experimental poems in Jalousie explore the ways in which expression of the deeply personal experience is both dictated to and altered by rigid societal expectations. The speaker of these highly personal poems can’t help but view language as a historical artifact, the DNA of past worlds, as these poems delve into the complexities of sorting out one’s individual identity amid broader cultural contexts. Paty’s poems attempt to connect the personal, private, intimate persona with elements that are always external—external not only to this poet but to every person.
These poems seek to capture fleeting moments of personal connection despite the impossibility of language, the societal dictates of gender roles, the pressures of making a living, the inexorable march of time, and the bewildering strangeness of architectural spaces. At the heart of this collection is “Premise,” an extensive poem that weaves in detours through the history of New York City, themes of discard, references to Bruegel's “Wedding Dance,” and discussions on representation and memory. The book also contains three full-color illustrations which augment the poet’s themes and concerns.
Jane Austen and Comedy
Erin Goss
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Jane Kenyon
The Making of a PoetDana Greene
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Pleasure-loving, sarcastic, stubborn, determined, erotic, deeply sad--Jane Kenyon’s complexity and contradictions found expression in luminous poems that continue to attract a passionate following. Dana Greene draws on a wealth of personal correspondence and other newly available materials to delve into the origins, achievement, and legacy of Kenyon’s poetry and separate the artist’s life story from that of her husband, the award-winning poet Donald Hall.
Impacted by relatives’ depression during her isolated childhood, Kenyon found poetry at college, where writers like Robert Bly encouraged her development. Her graduate school marriage to the middle-aged Hall and subsequent move to New Hampshire had an enormous impact on her life, moods, and creativity. Immersed in poetry, Kenyon wrote about women’s lives, nature, death, mystical experiences, and melancholy--becoming, in her own words, an “advocate of the inner life.” Her breakthrough in the 1980s brought acclaim as “a born poet” and appearances in the New Yorker and elsewhere. Yet her ongoing success and artistic growth exacerbated strains in her marriage and failed to stave off depressive episodes that sometimes left her non-functional. Refusing to live out the stereotype of the mad woman poet, Kenyon sought treatment and confronted her illness in her work and in public while redoubling her personal dedication to finding pleasure in every fleeting moment. Prestigious fellowships, high-profile events, residencies, and media interviews had propelled her career to new heights when leukemia cut her life short and left her husband the loving but flawed curator of her memory and legacy.
Revelatory and insightful, Jane Kenyon offers the first full-length biography of the elusive poet and the unquiet life that shaped her art.
Joanna Russ
Gwyneth Jones
University of Illinois Press, 2019
Joining the Conversation
Dialogues by Renaissance WomenJanet Levarie Smarr
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Avoiding the male-authored model of competing orations, French and Italian women of the Renaissance framed their dialogues as informal conversations, as letters with friends that in turn became epistles to a wider audience, and even sometimes as dramas. No other study to date has provided thorough, comparative view of these works across French, Italian, and Latin. Smarr's comprehensive treatment relates these writings to classical, medieval, and Renaissance forms of dialogue, and to other genres including drama, lyric exchange, and humanist invective -- as well as to the real conversations in women's lives -- in order to show how women adapted existing models to their own needs and purposes.
Janet Levarie Smarr is Professor of Theatre and Italian Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns
Madre María Rosa
Iter Press, 2009
Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns contains all the elements of a riveting adventure story. Through the eyes of the Mother Abbess, María Rosa, the reader is taken along on this journey through wars, pirates, disease, travel on the high seas, and treacherous mountain passes in the Andes. Five nuns set out in the early 1700s from their cloistered convent in Madrid, Spain, to travel halfway around the world to Lima, Peru. The journey lasted three years—an odyssey not all of them would complete. Yet, this unique historical document is so much more than a typical travel narrative. It illuminates the eighteenth-century way of life of religious women on both sides of the Atlantic basin. María Rosa’s lively prose attests to the literary connection among women religious writers of Spain and Latin America. This annotated edition and first-ever English translation of the manuscript will be of interest to scholars, students and anyone who wants to learn more about women’s history.
Journeys of a Mystic Soul in Poetry and Prose
Cecilia del Nacimiento
Iter Press, 2012
—Stacey Schlau
Professor, Department of Languages and Culture and the Women’s Studies Program
West Chester University, Pennsylvania
Julian Hawthorne
The Life of a Prodigal SonGary Scharnhorst
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), Nathaniel Hawthorne's only son, lived a long and influential life marked by bad circumstances and worse choices. Raised among luminaries such as Thoreau, Emerson, and the Beecher family, Julian became a promising novelist in his twenties, but his writing soon devolved into mediocrity.
What talent the young Hawthorne had was spent chasing across the changing literary and publishing landscapes of the period in search of a paycheck, writing everything from potboilers to ad copy. Julian was consistently short of funds because--as biographer Gary Scharnhorst is the first to reveal--he was supporting two households: his wife in one and a longtime mistress in the other.
The younger Hawthorne's name and work ethic gave him influence in spite of his haphazard writing. Julian helped to found Cosmopolitan and Collier's Weekly. As a Hearst stringer, he covered some of the era's most important events: McKinley's assassination, the Galveston hurricane, and the Spanish-American War, among others.
When Julian died at age 87, he had written millions of words and more than 3,000 pieces, out-publishing his father by a ratio of twenty to one. Gary Scharnhorst, after his own long career including works on Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and other famous writers, became fascinated by the leaps and falls of Julian Hawthorne. This biography shows why.
June in Eden
Rosalie Moffett
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
A sharp, darkly funny, and tender debut that exposes the fractures in our language, our technologies, and our attempts to call the world by its right name.
In June in Eden, Rosalie Ruth Moffett leads us through terrains that shift between the mythic and the modern. Sometimes the garden is wild and blooming; other times, the coveted tree is only hiding a cell tower, lungs become ATMs, and prayers travel by text message. This is a book for an age when “new kinds of war…keep / changing the maps,” and when even small slips—preying or praying—reveal the instability of the words we rely on.
At the heart of the collection lies an obsession with language: its power, its failures, and what remains when it falters. “Ruth,” our speaker notes, is “a kind of compassion / nobody wants anymore—the surviving half / of the pair of words is ruthless.” Throughout these poems, dark humor coexists with deep tenderness, reminding us of the human urge to “love the world / we made and all its shadows.
Moffett offers a speaker bewildered and awestruck by the world’s contradictions—its technological miracles, its medical uncertainties, its imaginative leaps. These poems, equal parts grief and wonder, give us a landscape that from some angles resembles paradise, and from others, something far stranger.
Just Anger
Representing Women's Anger in Early Modern EnglandGwynne Kennedy
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000
The first scholar to investigate the subject of women’s anger in early modern England, Gwynne Kennedy analyzes portrayals of and attitudes toward women’s anger in printed texts by or purporting to be written by women during the period.
Kennedy draws from recent critical work on emotions by historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and psychologists as well as comparative studies of the emotions by cultural anthropologists. Kennedy also examines a number of male-authored works, including sermons, conduct literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. The focus of her work, however, is on representations of women’s anger in printed works signed with women’s names in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. She addresses the ways these writings conform to, conflict with, or appear to reconfigure prevailing beliefs about women’s anger.
Kennedy looks at such literary texts as Mary Wroth’s romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, the first fiction by an English woman; Elizabeth Cary’s play, The Tragedy of Mariam, the earliest extant play in English by a woman; and Aemilia Lanyer’s verse collection, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. She also discusses religious writings by Protestant martyr Anne Askew and Elizabeth Cary’s history of Edward II. Kennedy considers as well defenses of women’s nature authored by women (Rachel Speght and Aemilia Lanyer) or published under female pseudonyms (“Jane Anger,” “Ester Sowernam,” and “Constantia Munda”).
Kennedy demonstrates the importance of class and race as factors affecting anger’s legitimacy and its forms of expression. She shows how early modern assumptions about women’s anger can help to create or exaggerate other differences among women. Her close scrutiny of anger against female inferiority emphasizes the crucial role of emotions in the construction of self-worth and identity.
Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing
Julie Marie Wade
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
You have a history, and a body. You are a history, and a body. Your body has (is) a history, too. As a girl, Julie Marie Wade was uninterested in makeup, boy-watching, and other trappings of conventional girlhood, much to her mother’s disappointment. Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe—movie stars immortalized as feminine ideals, even as they both died tragically and young—were lodestars that threw Wade’s own definition of beauty into relief as she stumbled into adulthood.
Now, in Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing, Wade traces the intimate story of coming of age in one particular body (as a lesbian, an only child, a Protestant attending Catholic school). She uses the language and tenets of music, math, religion, fairy tales, poetry, and art to reckon with the many facets of embodiment, sexuality, and love in our contemporary world. The diet industry, popular culture, and her own family all provide rich material for what is ultimately a lyrical and unflinching investigation into the questions that prickle deep within the human heart.
Justyna's Narrative
Gusta Davidson Draenger
University of Massachusetts Press, 1996
Written during World War II, Justyna's Narrative is a compelling account of the Krakow Jewish resistance. From February through April 1943, Gusta Davidson Draenger (aka “Justyna”) composed the narrative on scraps of paper smuggled into her prison cell. Between sessions of torture and interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo, she recorded the activities and spiritual aspirations of the clandestine group of young Jewish idealists who forged documents, acquired weapons, and committed acts of defiance against the Nazis.