Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post as "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina (1778), was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded. Most of her plays were not performed in her lifetime. She wrote a memoir of her father (1832) and many letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1889.
Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen was an American novelist. Working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries.
Isabel Angélica Allende Llona is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the genre magical realism, is known for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts, which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Erica Jong is an American novelist, satirist, and poet, known particularly for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. According to The Washington Post, it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth was an American writer of more than 60 novels in the latter part of the 19th century. She was the most popular American novelist of her day.
Jacqueline Jill Collins was an English romance novelist and actress. She moved to Los Angeles in 1985 and spent most of her career there. She wrote 32 novels, all of which appeared on The New York Times bestsellers list. Her books have sold more than 500 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages. Eight of her novels have been adapted for the screen, either as films or television miniseries. She was the younger sister of Dame Joan Collins.
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.
Eliza Lynn Linton was the first female salaried journalist in Britain and the author of over 20 novels. Despite her path-breaking role as an independent woman, many of her essays took a strong anti-feminist slant.
Susan Choi is an American novelist.
Nora Roberts is an American author of over 225 romance novels. She writes as J. D. Robb,Jill March and Sarah Hardesty.
Elizabeth Drew Stoddard was an American poet and novelist.
Harriette Simpson Arnow was an American novelist and historian, who lived in Kentucky and Michigan. Arnow has been called an expert on the people of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, but she herself loved cities and spent crucial periods of her life in Cincinnati and Detroit.
Dawn Powell was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. Known for her acid-tongued prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone." Nonetheless, Stella Adler and author Clifford Odets appeared in one of her plays. Her work was praised by Robert Benchley in The New Yorker and in 1939 she was signed as a Scribner author where Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with many of her contemporaries, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, became her editor. A 1963 nominee for the National Book Award, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature the following year. A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including author John Dos Passos, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet E.E. Cummings, Powell's work received renewed interest after Gore Vidal praised it in an 1987 editorial for The New York Review of Books. Since then, the Library of America has published two collections of her novels.
Audrey Niffenegger is an American writer, artist and academic. Her debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, published in 2003, was a bestseller.
Mary Boykin Chesnut was an American author noted for a book published as her Civil War diary, a "vivid picture of a society in the throes of its life-and-death struggle." She described the war from within her upper-class circles of Southern slaveowner society, but encompassed all classes in her book. She was married to a lawyer who served as a United States senator and Confederate officer. Chesnut worked toward a final form of her book in 1881–1884, based on her extensive diary written during the war years. It was published in 1905, 19 years after her death. New versions were published after her papers were discovered, in 1949 by the novelist Ben Ames Williams, and in 1981 by the historian C. Vann Woodward, whose annotated edition of the diary, Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981), won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982. Literary critics have praised Chesnut's diary—the influential writer Edmund Wilson termed it "a work of art" and a "masterpiece" of the genre—as the most important work by a Confederate author.
Ronald Sukenick was an American writer and literary theorist.
The Women's Room is the debut novel by American feminist author Marilyn French, published in 1977. It launched French as a major participant in the feminist movement and, while French states it is not autobiographical, the book reflects many autobiographical elements. For example, French, like the main character, Mira, was married and divorced, and then attended Harvard where she obtained a Ph.D. in English Literature. Despite the connection of The Women's Room to the feminist movement, French stated in a 1977 interview with The New York Times: "The Women's Room is not about the women's movement … but about women's lives today."
Carol Birch is an English novelist, lecturer and book critic. She also teaches creative writing.
Ariel Horn Levenson is an American novelist and teacher. She is known for turning her job-finding difficulties as a new college graduate into a humorous novel: Help Wanted, Desperately.
Bessie Breuer was an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. She was an O. Henry Award winner.
