Author Description

The women in this volume of the Heads and Tales series have a way with words. They are remarkable women, all with remarkable and sometimes extraordinary stories. Jim Stovall, in this volume, brings us his unique journalistic and artistic vision of women who whose writings and lives were always notable, sometimes notorious, and occasionally astonishing. Some of these women, such as Louisa May Alcott, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Eleanor Roosevelt, you will have heard of or read. Others will have receded – often unfairly – into the mists of history. What you will find here about each of these women is something new – some part of their story that you had never known. For instance: Louisa May Alcott, famously the author of Little Women, was also A.M. Bernard, author of what was in her time known as the “blood and thunder” novel, the gothic sensationalism that many readers of her day craved. Such writing put food on her family’s table. Aphra Behn, possibly the first female writer in English to make her living as a writer, was not only a popular playwright but also a spy for King Charles I. Anne Brontë, the least well-known of the Brontë sisters, wrote the most shocking and forward-looking feminist novel of them all – a novel that sister Charlotte hardily disapproved of. Rachel Harding Davis, mother of the famous journalist and early 20th-century heart-throb Richard Harding Davis, supported her family by writing some of the first American realism stories – decades before her male counterparts in the realism school took up their pens. And we haven’t even gotten to page 25 yet. There are many more such stories: the first female presidential candidate (far earlier than you might think); the first American detective novelist; the first voice from the White House that Americans heard after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The list goes on and on. And then there are the caricatures. These drawings by the author himself add insight and entert