I bought this book a few months ago (although it was published back in 2021). It's by Lauren Burke and Hannah Chapman, with illustrations by Kaley Bales.
In a way, it's just perfect: it's a pop culture mash-up! Short biographies of women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, authors of "classic" fiction (and nonfiction), presented in a graphic novel format.
I think that we are in another "Jane Austen" moment (more on that later), in part because this year is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, in 1775.
And, I attended a program on Mary Wollstonecraft this afternoon, and the speaker, Charlotte Gordon (author of Romantic Outlaws: the Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley), in which Frances Harper was mentioned. My ears perked up: Frances Harper is one of the authors treated in this book!
So it's all rather an opportune time to be considering this book.
I find myself wanting to call Why She Wrote a graphic novel. Of course, it's not a novel of any kind. It's about twenty short biographies of women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. But it is abundantly illustrated with "cartoon stories," cartoon strips that illustrate key episodes in the writers' lives.
It's a fun and entertaining book. Part of it is that it's so easy to read. And I think the other part of it is finding out about the backstories of well-known authors like Mary Shelley, and about writers I knew nothing about, like Frances Parker.
When I first sat down with the book, I was in a certain kind of mood. I wanted to read a story about a "win," as if classic literature were a basketball game. So, I decided to read the account of the lawsuit that Frances Hodgson Burnett won. That certainly was a win!
It's a beautiful book, as a physical object, and I think it would make a great gift for a teenager or young adult, especially at Christmas -- because of the short, easy to read chapters, it's something you can pick up and enjoy even if you have only 30 or 60 minutes to give to it.
I learned about this book through the "Bonnets at Dawn" podcast, hosted by Lauren Burke and Hannah Chapman. I strongly recommend it. Many of the authors in Why She Wrote are discussed in the podcast.
