March is Women’s History Month, and we are returning to our downstairs fiction book displays by featuring historical fiction focused on the female experience.
Nannie Helen Burroughs. Photograph, [Between 1900 and 1920]. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen prey to feverish dreams of wealth. Joaquín takes off for San Francisco to seek his fortune, and Eliza, pregnant with his child, decides to follow him.
As Eliza embarks on her perilous journey north in the hold of a ship and arrives in the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco, she must navigate a society dominated by greedy men. But Eliza soon catches on with the help of her natural spirit and a good friend, the Chinese doctor Tao Chi'en. What began as a search for love ends up as the conquest of personal freedom. (Publisher’s summary)
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
In her bestselling novel The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood masterfully took us to a chilling world of the future. In her astonishing new novel Alias Grace, she just as convincingly takes us back 150 years and inside the life and mind of one of the most notorious women of the 1840s. Grace Marks is serving a life sentence for her part in the vicious murders of Thomas Kinnear, a wealthy landowner, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Grace herself now claims to have no memory of the murders.Simon Jordan, a young New England doctor in the field of mental health and an expert on amnesia, has been engaged to find out the truth. To do so, he must awaken that part of Grace's mind that lies dormant, using the practices of the science he has such great faith in. As Grace reveals details about Kinnear's and Nancy's unconventional domestic arrangements, Simon brings her closer and closer to the day she has so determinedly repressed.Into this rich work of the imagination--of sex, violence, immigration, spiritualism, and the brutal existence of the underprivileged--Margaret Atwood has brought her brilliant insights into the relationships between men and women and those between the society of the entitled and those without positions. Superbly evoking a century past and alive with mesmerizing storytelling, Alias Grace is vintage Atwood. (Publisher’s summary)
Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter by William Wells Brown
First published in December 1853, Clotel was written amid then unconfirmed rumors that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with one of his slaves. The story begins with the auction of his mistress, here called Currer, and their two daughters, Clotel and Althesa. The Virginian who buys Clotel falls in love with her, gets her pregnant, seems to promise marriage—then sells her. Escaping from the slave dealer, Clotel returns to Virginia disguised as a white man in order to rescue her daughter, Mary, a slave in her father’s house. A fast-paced and harrowing tale of slavery and freedom, of the hypocrisies of a nation founded on democratic principles, Clotel is more than a sensationalist novel. It is a founding text of the African American novelistic tradition, a brilliantly composed and richly detailed exploration of human relations in a new world in which race is a cultural construct. (Goodreads.com summary - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/247960.Clotel?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=k286WKbLlU&rank=1)
The Dragon’s Village by Yuan-tsung Chen
Shanghai, 1949: we look through the eyes of Guan Ling-ling, a headstrong, idealistic seventeen-year-old. As her family departs for Hong Kong, Ling-ling boldly chooses to stay, and joins a revolutionary theater group which soon leaves the city to carry out the new reforms in the Chinese countryside. After a scant few weeks' preparation, this city-bred schoolgirl suddenly finds herself in one of China's most remote and impoverished areas, a world so far from her own experience that she can barely understand the lives she has been sent to change. (Publisher’s summary)
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons.
Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood-the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers-Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah-the four wives of Jacob. They love Dinah and give her gifts that are to sustain her through a damaged youth, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land. Dinah's story reaches out from a remarkable period of early history and creates an intimate, immediate connection. (Publisher’s summary)
S.: A Novel About the Balkans by Slavenka Drakulić
Set in 1992, during the height of the Bosnian war, S. reveals one of the most horrifying aspects of any war: the rape and torture of civilian women by occupying forces. S. is the story of a Bosnian woman in exile who has just given birth to an unwanted child—one without a country, a name, a father, or a language. Its birth only reminds her of an even more grueling experience: being repeatedly raped by Serbian soldiers in the "women's room" of a prison camp. Through a series of flashbacks, S. relives the unspeakable crimes she has endured, and in telling her story—timely, strangely compelling, and ultimately about survival—depicts the darkest side of human nature during wartime. (Goodreads.com summary - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/278232.S_?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=4sjnwSY7fN&rank=1)
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th-century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle's women's dungeon, and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, where she will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the tribal wars of Ghana to slavery and Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the south to the Great Migration to the streets of 20th century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi has written a modern masterpiece, a novel that moves through histories and geographies and--with outstanding economy and force--captures the troubled spirit of our own nation. (Publisher’s summary)
Sappho’s Leap by Erica Jong
Sappho's Leap is a journey back 2,600 years to inhabit the mind of the greatest love poet the world has ever known. At the age of fourteen, Sappho is seduced by the beautiful poet Alcaeus, plots with him to overthrow the dictator of their island, and is caught and married off to a repellent older man in hopes that matrimony will keep her out of trouble. Instead, it starts her off on a series of amorous adventures with both men and women, taking her from Delphi to Egypt, and even to the Land of the Amazons and the shadowy realm of Hades. (Goodreads.com summary - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/857713.Sappho_s_Leap?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=W88WuY5AaB&rank=1)
The House of Eliott by Jean Marsh
Beatrice, a ``spinster'' at 30, and her sister, Evangeline, just 20, suddenly find themselves independent and without many financial resources following the death of their widower father. Though a successful physician, Father apparently squandered much of his income on a secret life. Inheriting the house as their only tangible asset, Bea and Evie set out to establish their financial and social independence. And how they succeed! Their fashion house is a big success with the 1920s social elite of London. It is a pleasure to see the business and the sisters flourish as their story intertwines with other characters and causes representative of the decade. (Library Journal review)
Here’s to You, Jesusa! by Elena Poniatowska
Jesusa is a tough, fiery character based on a real working-class Mexican woman whose life spanned some of the seminal events of early twentieth-century Mexican history. Having joined a cavalry unit during the Mexican Revolution, she finds herself at the Revolution's end in Mexico City, far from her native Oaxaca, abandoned by her husband and working menial jobs. So begins Jesusa's long history of encounters with the police and struggles against authority. Mystical yet practical, undaunted by hardship, Jesusa faces the obstacles in her path with gritty determination. (Goodreads.com summary - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59200.Here_s_to_You_Jesusa_?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=qhiSLNEr4U&rank=1)
Hope Leslie, or, Early times in the Massachusetts by Catharine Maria Sedgwick
Set in seventeenth-century New England in the aftermath of the Pequod War, Hope Leslie not only chronicles the role of women in building the republic but also refocuses the emergent national literature on the lives, domestic mores, and values of American women. (Goodreads.com summary - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/887338.Hope_Leslie?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=eBFMFgheuf&rank=1) A novel that forced readers to confront the consequences of the Puritans' subjugation and displacement of the indigenous Indian population at a time when contemporaries were demanding still more land from the Cherokees, the Chickasaws, and the Choctaws. (Publisher’s summary)
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton by Jane Smiley
Lidie Harkness marries Thomas Newton and moves with him to Kansas in an effort to keep it a Free State in the years before the Civil War. She is an earnest convert to the abolitionist cause and events lead her to disguise herself as a boy in her search for justice. (Publisher’s summary) At the start of the novel, Lidie simply adopts her husband's abolitionist views; eventually, the young Lidie becomes a fervent believer, with the courage to challenge her husband and the social skill to damn the Kansas abolitionists in public. She presumptuously dons men's clothing and sets out alone to search for her husband's killers, but lets herself be tricked and encouraged by a slave woman looking only for escape. (Library Journal review)
Jubilee by Margaret Walker
Here is the classic--and true--story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress, a Southern Civil War heroine to rival Scarlett O'Hara. Vyry bears witness to the South's prewar opulence and its brutality, to its wartime ruin and the subsequent promise of Reconstruction. It is a story that Margaret Walker heard as a child from her grandmother, the real Vyry's daughter. The author spent thirty years researching the novel so that the world might know the intelligent, strong, and brave black woman called Vyry. The phenomenal acclaim this best-selling book has achieved from readers black and white, young and old, attests to her success. (Publisher’s summary)
Dessa Rose by Sherley A. Williams
Imaginatively written by Sherley A. Williams, this book is the fictional confluence of two disparate real-life events: first, a slave revolt in Kentucky in 1829 led by a pregnant woman and, second, a white woman in North Carolina in 1830 who harbored runaway slaves. Thanks to the author's poetic license in writing this novel, these two women meet in the pages of this book. And what a meeting it is. (Review on Goodreads.com by Cathryn Conroy - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3570641337?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1)
The Chronicles of Noah and Her Sisters by Miriam Therese Winter
Winter reimagines the central narratives of Genesis and Exodus as read through the eyes of women in these stories. Noah, one of the Hebrew wives of Solomon, is the narrator and organizer of these tales. We not only hear the voices of Sarah, Rachel, and Rebekah but also encounter the stories of Keturah, who bore six sons for Abraham after Sarah's death, and Asenath, the Egyptian wife of Joseph. These women's recollections give us insights into a little-known side of biblical history. (Publisher’s summary)
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