Author: Joanna Biggs
When author Joanna Biggs’ marriage fell apart, she went to her bookshelf to pick up the pieces. She pulled books by often-considered legendary, well-established figures — women whose names define eras — but Biggs approached them through a more focused, personal lens, searching for how each of them rebuilt their lives and their identities through writing.
The result is “A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again,” published in 2023.
Part memoir-part criticism and full of reflective introspection, Biggs re-examined the works of these women who had shaped her life. Beyond just the literary influences, she wanted to learn how they began again and again after disappointment — like many of us must in our own lives.
These are Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans’s pen name), Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante. As she puts it, the women are all taken down from their pedestals, their work and lives seen in a new light.
