In the Shadows: Interesting American Women Writers Quiz

Answer: Jean Stafford

Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970. She is one of those writers who gets more acclaim for her stories than for her longer fiction. The fascinating novel, "Boston Adventure," was a best seller when it came out in 1944. She wrote two more highly innovative novels, "The Catherine Wheel" (1952) and "The Mountain Lion" (1947).

She is perhaps best known for being being terribly disfigured and wounded in an automobile accident with her then husband Robert Lowell. Their marriage was fraught and negative.

She would later write a long short story, "The Interior Castle" to describe the effects of that marriage on her life. It is a shame that her novels were not recognized for being genuine experimental milestones.

Answer: Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (August 11, 1836 - December 22, 1919 in Caldwell, New Jersey) published approximately 450 poems. Many people are calling her the "strongest poet of her day" after Emily Dickinson. Her poetry came out in an Amazon series called "American Poetry Recovery Series." Reading them again, a reader can find her poems surprisingly modern.

Answer: Georgia Douglas Johnson

She is of mixed race, African American, Native American and English. Her education is primarily in music--she has a degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. She was prolific, publishing at least 200 poems, 40 plays, 30 songs, and edited 100 books by 1930.

Her two books of poems are "The Heart of a Woman" and "Bronze." Her most famous book is "An Autumn Love Child" Then, in the 1930s, she wrote anti-lynching writings which she found difficult to publish. Many of these writings have been lost.

Many sources agree that after her funeral many of her writings were thrown out.

Answer: Constance Woolson

Constance Fenimore Woolson met Henry James in 1880 and, ever since, people have speculated as to the nature of their relationship. Speculation was fuelled still more when in 1894 she jumped to her death from the window of her apartment on the Grand Canal in Venice. Woolson wrote short stories and novels dealing with the South, expatriates and the Great Lakes.

Her most famous short story is "Miss Grief," and her most admired novel is "For the Major."

Answer: Mary Austin

Mary Austin was born in Illinois and then made it her goal to learn as much as she could about Native-American life in the Mojave Desert. Her most famous book is "The Land of Little Rain," which is a brilliant defense of the desert. She wrote plays, essays and poetry. In Carmel, California, she was part of a group that included Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and George Sterling, and she was one of the founders of the Forest Theater.
She wrote an autobiography called "Earth Horizon." Her writing is stark and dramatic. She forms part of a generation of women writers moving away from being private, stay-at-home mothers to become independent, freethinking women.

Answer: Phillis Wheatley

Wheatley had a very dramatic life, being kidnapped in Kenya and brought to America in 1761 on a ship called "Phillis." Her slave owner in America educated her in languages, including Latin and history. Her metered poetry soon took up the growing call for freedom. She was both celebrated and also belittled. She married a black grocer who subsequently left her. For all her fame, she died a poor woman, having had to work as a servant after her family life unravelled.
Ironically, at one point, people actually interrogated her to see if she could be smart enough to write her very cultured poems.

Answer: Olive Ann Oatman Fairchild

Fairchild was captured in Arizona at age 13 (1851) by Yavapai Indians (although this fact is debated). She was sold to Mojave Indians and had the permanent mark of a slave-blue cactus needle tattoo on her chin. She has an out of print title at Amazon, "Five Years Among Wild Savages: The renowned Apachee captive Miss Olive Oatman. This distinguished lady, whose tragical history of Indian massacre and captivity ... among the Apachee & Mohave Indians." Readers often point out frequently that her account is loaded with racist language, as this title suggests.
Whatever is the truth, her picture (with her blue chin) is chilling.

Answer: Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller co-edited (with Ralph Waldo Emerson) "The Dial," the Transcdendentalist journal. Her father famously overworked her in her childhood. Later, she will inspire great controversy. Hawthorne satirized her in "The Blithedale Romance." She conducted what she called "conversations" in her Boston home and was the author of "Women in the Nineteenth Century" (1845), an in-depth study of women's exclusion from independence, intellectual, legal and cultural.

She also was the author of a complex study, "Summer on the Lakes," a journey she made to the Mid-West.

In it, she observed Native Americans and the coming of changes to Michigan and Illinois. She will leave the United States and go to Italy as a correspondent. There she observed the Italian revolution, met and fell in love with Count Ossoli, and, upon returning with him returning to America, died in a tragic ship accident near Fire Island.

Her body was never found. Fuller is one of the first women intellectuals: she translated, theorized, met numerous famous people overseas. For instance, she was the first woman allowed to use Harvard Library. Fuller wrote that domestic life for women in particular has to combine the mind and the body.

Answer: Hannah Foster

Hannah Foster published "The Coquette, or the History of Eliza Wharton" in 1797. Although this novel was a best seller in its time, many people today have difficulty reading it effectively. In addition to being a novel of retribution in that the main woman character who got pregnant 'out of wedlock' died in childbirth, being typically "seduced and abandoned," the novel becomes even more interesting in its presentation of psychological imbalances and tortured self-awareness.

Answer: Anais Nin

Anais Nin was born in France and became a naturalized American citizen. She is famous first because of her long affair with the celebrated writer, Henry Miller and also because of her diaries, novels and letters. Her writing is known for its explicit sexuality.

In general, she has always taken second place to Miller, and her writing, although it is very experimental, is not assessed for that reason primarily. Her writing focuses on the psychological and on sensations. Some of her books are The House of Incest" and "Cities of the Interior" which Nin calls a "continuous novel."

Answer: Zelda Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre married in 1920. For many readers, she is famous mainly for being an archetypal flapper. She was beautiful and daring, and she was creative--a dancer and a writer. In intricate ways, F. Scott Fitzgerald competed with his wife over her writing.

He did unusual things like quote from her diaries directly in his novels. She did not respect this borrowing and said that his plagiarism began right in their home. She had a nervous breakdown and spent the rest of her life institutionalized.

In 1948, she died in a fire which burnt up the sanitarium where she was living in Asheville, North Carolina. She is truly a remarkable person whose life story appears in depth in Nancy Milford's 1970 biograph, "Zelda."

Answer: Ursula LeGuin

Le Guin wrote "The Earth Sea Trilogy," "The Lathe of Heaven," and, more recently, her continuation of Virgil, a novel called "Lavinia." Le Guin's fiction is speculative, non-conventional, a true mixture of philosophical novel and narrative action. Her writing combines psychological, speculative and philosophical thinking.

Answer: Ina Coolbrith

In 1915, Coolbrith was named poet laureate of California. Her life became very social. She knew all the famous writers in the California scene in the late 19th century, Joaquin Miller, Mark Twain, Jack London and others. Unfortunately, she believed, it seems, that her mission was to serve the careers of other writers before developing her own gift.

In 1906, all her notes and drafts were burned down in a huge fire. She had been thinking of writing an autobiography, a book all agree could have been a true jewel, given her closeness to so many writers and creative people.

The fire destroyed that plan.

Answer: H. D.

HD's amazing life has been subject of much attention. Barbara Guest wrote a biography in 1984. HD, born Hilda Doolittle, initially was linked to the American poet, Ezra Pound and his movement called Imagism or a direct and unmediated connection to perceived material.

In fact, Pound sent in to Harriet Monroe some of her poems which he famously signed as "H.D., Imagiste." HD was intimately connected to major thinkers and writers of the 20th century. Her books include a novel "Bid Me to Live," a trilogy, an important piece of writing called "A Tribute to Freud." "The Gift," "Hermonine," "Bid Me to Live," "Palimpsest," "Collected Poems." Many argue that she created a specifically "woman's mythology," in "Trilogy," "Helen in Egypt," and "Hermetic Definition." She is a fascinating, profound writer whose depth and worth many find daunting.

Answer: Djuna Barnes

T.S. Eliot praised "Nightwood" (1936) for its complexity and its sophistication.. The famous Dylan Thomas thought it was one of the great books written by a woman in the twentieth century. One of her books is called "I Could Never be Lonely without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes.

Her titles are outrageous: in 1915 she published "The Book of Repulsive Women." Her writing style overall is unique, difficult and important. Djuna Barnes lived from 1892-1982. From being born in a log cabin, she moved to the high culture salons of Modernist Paris. Finally, she returned to Greenwich Village where she spent the last four decades of her long life.