Fabulous female authors who were awe-inspiring

International Women’s Day is here once again (9^th March) and to celebrate I thought I would share some of my favourite female authors who had surprising and very inspirational back stories. Overcoming financial adversity, escaping Hitler, becoming the family breadwinners, winning legal battles which in turn shaped copyright laws, campaigning for women’s rights, dealing with family tragedies and battling with mental health, these ladies were certainly inspirational trailblazers.

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849 – 1924)

Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was a British-born American novelist and playwright. She is best known for her classic children’s books; Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). However, her story writing started earlier as she began writing and publishing stories at 19 years of age to support her family who was struggling financially following the death of her father when she was only three years old.

Frances married Swan Burnett in 1872 and they had two sons: Lionel and Vivian. Sadly, Lionel tragically died in 1890 from tuberculosis and Frances had a relapse of the depression she had struggled with for much of her life.

In 1888, she won a lawsuit in England over the dramatic rights to Little Lord Fauntleroy, establishing a precedent that was incorporated into British copyright law in 1911.

She divorced Burnett in 1898 and the Washington Post state the divorce resulted from Burnett’s “advanced ideas regarding the duties of a wife and the rights of women”.

In 1900, she married Stephen Townsend, an actor 10 years younger than she, though it wasn’t set to last as they divorced in 1902.
Frances divided her time between her two homes in Long island and Manchester. She died in New York in 1924.

Louisa May Alcott 1832 -1888

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist, best known for the novel, Little Women, which she wrote in 1868. Louisa was born in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her family moved to Boston, where her father established an experimental school and joined a Transcendentalist club.

Louisa began writing under a male pseudonym to support her family, however the women in her characters were always strong, self-reliant and imaginative, strongly reflecting her feminist beliefs.

After the American Civil War began, she volunteered as a nurse but contracted typhoid and pneumonia from the unsanitary hospital conditions and was discharged home. She was treated with a toxic mercury compound called calomel. Louisa suffered from symptoms of mercury poisoning for the rest of her life.

Louisa helped her parents to hide slaves who had escaped via the Underground Railroad and was a renowned abolitionist, socialising with fellow abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Louisa read and admired the “Declaration of Sentiments” published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights and was friends with women’s suffrage activist Julia Ward Howe.

Louisa wrote her semi-autobiographical novel Little Women in 1868 about her life growing up with three sisters. Louisa was always considered herself a tomboy growing up and the Jo character in Little Women was based on her, however Louisa, unlike Jo, never married. In 1879 her younger sister May died, and Louisa took in May’s daughter, Louisa May Nieriker (“Lulu”), who was only two years old at the time.

Louisa was an early suffragette. She wrote for a women’s rights periodical and went door-to-door in Massachusetts to encourage women to vote. In 1879, the state passed a law allowing women to vote in local elections on anything involving education and children and Louisa was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.

She died in Boston on March 6, 1888, two days after visiting her father on his deathbed.

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874 – 1942)

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London) in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her mother died when she was a toddler, so Lucy was raised by her maternal grandparents.

Lucy became a teacher and also wrote stories in her spare time, publishing more than 100 stories between 1897 and 1907. In 1908 she published her first book, Anne Of Green Gables, which was immediately successful.

After inheriting money when her grandmother died, Lucy was financially independent. She married a minister in 1911, though the marriage was not a happy one. Lucy quipped that those women whom God wanted to destroy He would make into the wives of ministers.

The couple had three children, although her second son was stillborn. Lucy battled with depression, made worse by the tragedies of World War I and her husband’s melancholic religious beliefs.

A dispute with her original publisher, L.C. Page & Company, over royalties owed to her lasted over ten years, from 1917 to 1928, and ended with Lucy receiving a cheque for $15,000.

In the last year of her life Lucy finished her 9th book featured Anne of Green Gables and it was delivered to her publisher on the day of her death. However perhaps due to the dark tone and anti-war sentiment (during WWII) it was not published for another 30 years when it was edited and released as The Road To Yesterday in 1974.

Lucy Montgomery is one of the most successful Canadian authors of all time.

Mary Norton (1903 – 1992)

Kathleen Mary Norton (née Pearson) was an English children’s author famous for writing The Borrowers and The Magic Bed Knob. She was the daughter of a physician and was raised in a Georgian house at the end of the High Street in Leighton Buzzard (just down the road from us here in Milton Keynes!). The house now consists of part of Leighton Middle School, known within the school as The Old House, and was reportedly the setting of her novel The Borrowers.

In 1927, Mary married Robert C. Norton and they had four children together, 2 boys and 2 girls. Mary began working for the War Office in 1940 and Robert joined the Navy, Mary and the children moved temporarily to the United States. It was while she was working at the British Purchasing Commission during the Second World War in New York that Mary began writing books.

Her first book was The Magic Bed Knob published in 1943, which, together with the sequel Bonfires and Broomsticks, became the basis for the Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks released in 1971.

The Borrowers was published in 1952 and won her the Carnegie Medal, the most important prize in children’s fiction. The story was based on fantasies and memories of her childhood, Mary was short-sighted as a child and could often notice the minutiae of the teeming life in the countryside around her.

Mary received high praise indeed for this novel, even receiving a letter from C S Lewis, the author of the Narnia books, who wrote to her in 1956: “A stranger write his thanks and congratulations for The Borrowers and The Borrowers Afield. They have given me great and (I anticipate) lasting pleasure.”

TV, theatre and film adaptations of The Borrowers have delighted children and adults alike since 1973. The latest adaptation was a British film made in 2011, starring Stephen Fry and Victoria Wood.