Virginia Women

The exploration of the history of Virginia women through the lives of exemplary and remarkable individuals. Seventeen essays written by established and emerging scholars recover the stories and voices of a diverse group of women.

An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her. How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies--of strength, style, and creativity--shaped Woolf's path to the radical writing that inspires so many today. Gill casts back to Woolf's French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L'Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf's aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sistersStella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.

This is the first biography to concentrate exclusively on Woolf's close and inspirational friendships with the key women in her life, including the caregivers of her Victorian childhood who instilled in her a lifelong battle between creativity and convention: her taciturn sister, Vanessa Bell; enigmatic artist Dora Carrington; complex writer Katherine Mansfield; aristocratic novelist Vita Sackville-West; and riotous, militant composer Ethel Smyth.

Virginia Women is the first of two volumes exploring the history of Virginia women through the lives of exemplary and remarkable individuals. This collection of seventeen essays, written by established and emerging scholars, recovers the stories and voices of a diverse group of women, from the seventeenth century through the Civil War era. Placing their subjects in their larger historical contexts, the authors show how the experiences of Virginia women varied by race, class, age, and marital status, and also across both space and time. Some essays examine the lives of well-known women—such as First Lady Dolley Madison—from a new perspective. Others introduce readers to relatively obscure historical figures: the convicted witch Grace Sherwood; the colonial printer Clementina Rind; Harriet Hemings, the enslaved daughter of Thomas Jefferson. Essays on the frontier heroine Mary Draper Ingles and the Civil War spy Elizabeth Van Lew examine the real women behind the legends. Altogether, the essays in this collection offer readers an engaging and personal window onto the experiences of women in the Old Dominion.

This classic study of Black Carib culture and its preservation through ancestral rituals organized by older women now includes a foreword by Constance R. Sutton and an afterword by the author. "One of the outstanding studies of this genre. . . . Refreshingly, the book has good photographs, as well as strong endnotes and bibliography, and very useful tables, figures, maps, and index." -- Choice "An outstanding contribution to the literature on female-centered bilateral kinship and residence." -- Grant D. Jones, American Ethnologist "A richly detailed account of a contemporary culture in which older women are important, valued, and self-respecting." -- Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly "A combination of competent research, interwoven themes, and an easily readable, sometimes beautifully evocative, prose style." -- Heather Strange, The Gerontologist

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Winner, 2009 Best Book Award, Society for the Study of Early Modern WomenWinner, 2008 PROSE Award for Best Book in Language, Literature, and Linguistics. Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers This is the first comprehensive study of the remarkably rich tradition of women’s writing that flourished in Italy between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Virginia Cox documents this tradition and both explains its character and scope and offers a new hypothesis on the reasons for its emergence and decline. Cox combines fresh scholarship with a revisionist argument that overturns existing historical paradigms for the chronology of early modern Italian women’s writing and questions the historiographical commonplace that the tradition was brought to an end by the Counter Reformation. Using a comparative analysis of women's activities as artists, musicians, composers, and actresses, Cox locates women's writing in its broader contexts and considers how gender reflects and reinvents conventional narratives of literary change.

How did Virginia become the amazing state that it is today you may wonder? Virginia's Remarkable Women: Daughters, Wives, Sisters, and Mothers Who Shaped History recognizes the women who shaped the Old Dominion. The lives of female teachers, writers, entrepreneurs, and artists from across the state are illuminated through short biographies. Discover fifteen extraordinary women from Virginia's past, including Pocahontas, Martha Washington, Dolley Madison, travel writer Anne Newport Royall, pioneering banker Maggie Lena Walker, Civil War spies Belle Boyd and Elizabeth Van Lew, and poet Anne Spencer.