Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net (1954), was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Jean Rhys, was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she mainly resided in England, where she was sent for her education. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In 1978, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her writing.
Shirley Hardie Jackson was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Her writing career spanned over two decades, during which she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.
Charlotte Dacre, born Charlotte King, was an English author of Gothic novels. Most references today are given as Charlotte Dacre, but she first wrote under the pseudonym "Rosa Matilda" and later adopted a second pseudonym to confuse her critics. She became Charlotte Byrne upon her marriage to Nicholas Byrne in 1815.
Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point-of-view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation as Antoinette is caught in a white, patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica.
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.
The Maids is a 1947 play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. It was first performed at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris in a production that opened on 17 April 1947, which Louis Jouvet directed.
Sarah Ann Waters is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.
Charlotte MacLeod was a Canadian-American mystery fiction writer.
Marina Endicott is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Her novel, Good to a Fault, won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Canada and the Caribbean and was a finalist for the Giller Prize. Her next, The Little Shadows, was long-listed for the Giller and short-listed for the Governor General's Literary Award. Close to Hugh, was long-listed for the Giller Prize and named one of CBC's Best Books of 2015. Her latest, The Difference, won the City of Edmonton Robert Kroetsch prize. It was published in the US by W.W. Norton as The Voyage of the Morning Light in June 2020.
The Left Bank and Other Stories is the first collection of short stories and literary debut of Dominican author Jean Rhys. It was first published by Jonathan Cape (London) and Harper & Brothers in 1927, and contained an introduction by Ford Madox Ford. The original subtitle of the collection was "sketches and studies of present-day Bohemian Paris".
Claire Messud is an American novelist and literature and creative writing professor. She is best known as the author of the novel The Emperor's Children (2006).
Margaret Moore Kennedy was an English novelist and playwright. Her most successful work, as a novel and as a play, was The Constant Nymph. She was a productive writer and several of her works were filmed. Three of her novels were reprinted in 2011.
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was a Swedish writer. She published her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, at the age of 33. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she was the first woman to be granted a membership in the Swedish Academy in 1914.
Alexis Lykiard is a British writer of Greek heritage, who began his prolific career as novelist and poet in the 1960s. His poems about jazz have received particular acclaim, including from Maya Angelou, Hugo Williams, Roy Fisher, Kevin Bailey and others. Lykiard is also known as translator of Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud and many notable French literary figures. In addition, Lykiard has written two highly praised intimate memoirs of Jean Rhys: Jean Rhys Revisited (2000) and Jean Rhys: Afterwords (2006).
Selma Vaz Dias, also known as Selma Cohen-Vaz Dias, was a British actress, writer, and painter. Dias was born in Amsterdam to Jacob Vaz Dias and Hana Hamburger. She had a brother, Salomon. She moved to the United Kingdom, where she spent most of her career.
Quartet is Jean Rhys's 1928 debut novel, set in Paris's bohemian café society. Originally published by Chatto & Windus, Quartet was Rhys's first published book other than her short story collection The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927).
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) was Jean Rhys's second novel, originally published by Jonathan Cape. Set in interwar Paris and London, the novel is autobiographical fiction and thematically sequential to Rhys's debut novel Quartet (1928). As Quartet explored Marya Zelli's relationship and breakup, this novel tracks Julia Martin's post-breakup months when her ex-lover's allowance cheques stop.
Jean Rhys: Letters 1931-1966 is a posthumous compilation of author Jean Rhys's letters, first published in 1984 by André Deutsch and from 1985 by Penguin Books.
H. Pearl Adam was the pen name of Helen Pearl Adam, an English journalist who documented her experience in Paris during World War I.
