The Norton Book of Women's Lives

"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.

Phyllis Rose is the author of Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages and other noted works of biography and criticism. She is professor of English at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

1995 / paperback / ISBN 0-393-31290-9 / 832 pages / GENDER STUDIES/BIOGRAPHY

• "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