Description

I took off my wedding ring – a gold band with half a line of ‘Morning Song’ by Sylvia Plath etched inside – and for weeks afterwards, my thumb would involuntarily reach across my palm for the warm bright circle that had gone. I didn’t throw the ring into the long grass, like women do in the movies, but a feeling began bubbling up nevertheless, from my stomach to my throat: it could fling my arms out. I was free.

A few years into her marriage and feeling societal pressure to surrender to domesticity, Joanna Biggs found herself longing for a different kind of existence. Was this all there was? She divorced without knowing what would come next.

Newly untethered, Joanna returned to the free-spirited writers of her youth and was soon reading in a fever – desperately searching for evidence of lives that looked more like her own, for the messiness and freedom, for a possible blueprint for intellectual fulfillment.

In A Life of One’s Own, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante are all taken down from their pedestals, their work and lives seen in a new light. Joanna wanted to learn more about the conditions these women needed to write their best work, and how they addressed the questions she herself was struggling with: Is domesticity a trap? Is life worth living if you have lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman? Why is it so important for women to read one another?

This is a radical and intimate examination of the unconventional paths these women took – their pursuits and achievements but also their disappointments and hardships. And in exploring the things that gave their lives the most meaning, we find fuel for our own singular intellectual paths.

Publisher Review

A meditation, by turns glorious and aching, on what it means to be a woman and to try to be free -- AMIA SRINIVASAN, author of THE RIGHT TO SEX Joanna Biggs is an unmissable writer. She gives new scope and fresh meaning to the idea of literary empathy -- ANDREW O'HAGAN, author of MAYFLIES I adored this book. I started turning down pages to note favourite parts, then found myself turning down almost every other page. It's such a generous, enlivening work, destined to be passed from friend to friend for a long time to come -- MEGAN HUNTER, author of THE END WE START FROM Joanna Biggs is one of our sharpest critics and wisest interrogators of how to live. This is a deeply moving and invigorating book -- FRANCESCA WADE, author of SQUARE HAUNTING To make sense of and find a shape to one's life within the context of one's literary predecessors is the project of Biggs's brilliant book, which combines incisive biographies with a personal story of starting over. This book reframed my own life in the most startling and revealing ways, illuminating complicated desires and lifelong debates via the absorbing stories of nine women authors who I now consider sisters, teachers, kin. A deeply moving meditation on reading and writing, friendship, desire, the life of the mind, and the woman writer's perennial yearning to be free -- RACHEL YODER, author of NIGHTBITCH Written with profound sensitivity and a singular eye for detail, A Life of One's Own is engrossing, surprising and moving reading for anyone interested in what it means to write, and to live -- LAUREN OYLER, author of FAKE ACCOUNTS Such beautiful, meaningful writing on the pursuit of beauty and meaning. It's the book equivalent of sinking into a hot bath after a difficult day -- EMMA FORREST, author of BUSY BEING FREE