"A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again," by Joanna Biggs

Readers can see why I would choose to read “A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again” (Ecco, 2023), by Joanna Biggs: It is a combination of literary discussion of eight famous and outstanding women writers with Biggs’ making connections with her own life and work (thus she takes the position of the ninth writer included in the title, which sounds presumptuous, but is done in a humble way). The writers’ lives and work are the main focus, but the author’s own experiences provide a kind of bridge between readers and the eight famed writers. I know you will want to know which writers are the focus of the book; they are Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. I have read and admired and treasured each of these writers. Readers might wonder about the “begin again” part of the subtitle. In each case, the writer went through some kind of difficulty or obstacle, whether physical, financial, marital, mental, emotional, or otherwise, while working her way toward writing, and managed to transcend that obstacle. This focus was a good reminder that for so long, women were not encouraged to be writers, and women writers had so much less support in writing than men did. Although I already knew quite a bit about each of the eight writers, I still found much to learn and think about. I savored the book, even loved it, as it offered such wonderful insights into the specific writers, their lives and their work, and to the situations of women writers more generally, historically and still.