The Norton Book of Women's Lives [Paperback]

Phyllis Rose (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 1995

"This remarkable and wide-ranging collection, full of surprises, should encourage any woman who is trying to survive in a man's world, and enlighten any man who sincerely wants to understand contemporary women." —Alison Lurie

"This magnificent, handsome, handful of an anthology . . ."* includes sixty-one substantial selections from the twentieth-century literature of women's lives: autobiographies, journals, and memoirs. "As varied in humanity as in geography,"** the women whose life stories are collected here include the famous—Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf—and the surprising—Emma Mashinini, a black South African labor organizer; Onnie Lee Logan, an Alabama "granny" midwife; Sara Suleri, an expatriate in America who reflects hilariously on the language of food in her native Pakistan.

"Destined to become a classic,"‡ this treasury of women's lives, brimming with intelligence, passion, wit, and determination, is a celebration of life itself.

*Hungry Mind Review


**Washington Post Book World


‡Library Journal

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This amazingly rich lode of memoirs, letters, and diaries jumbles together a great roster of 20th-century women, including Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Bernadette Devlin, Emily Mashinini, Sara Suleri, and Santha Rama Rau.

Le Ly Hayslip, the sixth child in a Vietnamese peasant family, describes a life pinched between the violence of Viet Cong revolutionaries and South Vietnamese republicans. Poet and lesbian feminist Audre Lorde writes about being introduced to the wonders of reading as a stubborn, bright, legally blind youngster. "I lay spreadeagled on the floor of the Children's Room like a furious brown toad, screaming bloody murder and embarrassing my mother to death," she recalls. Jill Ker Conway tells of her father's depression and death when a drought crushed their sheep farm in the Australian outback.

The excerpts drop us smack into the middle of each life; inventive cross-referencing encourages the reader to fly back and forth, sampling other writings on "filial exasperation," for example, or child's-eye views of romance and war. --Francesca Coltrera

From Library Journal

Because of the breadth and richness of these 61 selections, which demonstrate the evolution of women's autobiographical writing, this anthology is destined to become a classic. Works of the famous, i.e., Helen Keller and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, are interspersed with those not publicly known. There are landmark passages from Anne Frank, Mary McCarthy, and Anais Nin, women whose names are synonymous with the diary form. Many passages represent the experiences of political activists like Bernadette Devlin. The collection is multicultural in scope, ranging, for example, from the poetry of Maya Angelou in the United States to the oral autobiography of Nisa, an African tribal member. The emphasis is upon experience rather than literary quality, resulting in the inclusion of passages not readily available elsewhere. The selections are alphabetically arranged, and the introductory material about each author helpfully refers the reader to related passages. Recommended for public and academic library collections.
- Mary Ellen Beck, Troy P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 832 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 7th edition (April 17, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393312909
• ISBN-13: 978-0393312904
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #474,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Most enlightening book I've ever read, August 14, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Seneca, Missouri) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Norton Book of Women's Lives (Hardcover)

This is by far the best book I've read in the last few years. I picked it at random from the library, but I didn't want to take it back when I was finished with it. As an aspiring anthropologist, being put smack in the middle of so many different women's lives from all over the world at all time periods of the twentieth century was absolutely fascinating. I've made a list of all the selections that have inspired me enough to make me want to read the book it was taken from, and the list is two pages long! The book is an excellent montage of so many different walks of life, I think it should win some kind of award for it's superb editing. I would recommend this book to anybody interested in other women's lives, and to any men wondering how we really think and feel.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye Opening, May 30, 2009

By 

Ink-Stained Fingers "Melissa" (Maine, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Norton Book of Women's Lives (Hardcover)

I received this book as part of the Wellesley Book Award, and to be honest, I wasn't expecting much. Most of my friends who had received book awards had gotten dictionaries or other books that looked wonderfully useful if one wanted to fall asleep quickly and on the outside this one seemed to be no exception.

But then I started reading. The introduction itself is so well written, it could stand alone as an essay on women's writing. And then the selections, oh the selections. The choice and editing of the selections are of such a high quality that you never feel as if you are reading only a selection; each piece is long enough to feel complete. And despite the textbook look, it is engrossing in its diversity and quality of writing.

I would recommend this book not only as reading in itself, but also as a jumping-off point. I have marked so many selections that I would like to read in their entirety.

Definitely worth the money.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wild women, women breaking loose, December 21, 2007

By 

Story Circle Book Reviews - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Norton Book of Women's Lives (Paperback)

I love anthologies because they are so rich and various. This one, edited by a woman with a clear, strong ear for women's voices, has plenty to offer: 61 substantial selections from the twentieth-century literature of women's autobiographies, journals, and memoirs.

"I didn't want to do my duty," Phyllis Rose says of herself growing up. (She wanted to be a cowgirl.) "Nor did I want models...of noble self-sacrifice and altruism. I wanted wild women, women who broke loose, women who lived life to the full, whatever that meant. What did it mean to live life to the full? How fully could a woman live?" In this collection, we hear a chorus of "wild women" who show us in many ways how fully we might live. What stories these are, what fascinating lives, lived on the edge of pain, perception, and truth. These are lives that liberate and enlarge the rest of us. Read them, retell them, and use them as models for telling your own story.

by Susan Wittig Albert

for Story Circle Book Reviews

www.storycirclebookreviews.org

reviewing books by, for, and about women