Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Women

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” Jane Austen at her witty, observant, intelligent, and sympathetic best, in this collection of her letters written to family and friends. Compiled by her niece Fanny Knight’s son Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen (the first Baron Brabourne), and edited by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, this collection includes a preface written by the editor and notes from Lord Brabourne. It was originally published in 1892.

This inspiring autobiography by Helen Keller is an account of her life from her family history up to her last years of college, supplemented by her personal letters from age 7 to 21. This edition includes letters and reports contributed by her teacher, Anne Sullivan, and the editor, John Albert Macy.

Cari Beauchamp masterfully combines biography with social and cultural history to examine the lives of Frances Marion and her many female colleagues who shaped filmmaking from the early teens through the 1940s. Frances Marion was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter - male or female - for almost three decades, wrote almost 200 produced films and remains the only woman to win two Academy Awards for original screenwriting (The Big House and The Champ).

Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran on May 5, 1864, was an American journalist, author, and charity worker who received initial renown after writing a stinging expose of the mistreatment of the mentally ill while faking insanity and living undercover at a New York mental institution. At a time when women were just beginning to break into the field of journalism, the type of undercover investigative reporting undertaken by Bly set an important precedent, allowing her to successfully pioneer working in the male dominated field of newspaper writing.

In the novel Little Women, Mr. March goes off to war. But in real life, it was Jo March (Louisa May Alcott herself, an avowed abolitionist) who traveled to Washington to nurse Northern soldiers. This is Alcott’s memoir but she chose to use the pseudonym “Tribulation Periwinkle” to tell her story. Despite the subject matter, her account is full of amusing anecdotes as she makes her way alone from Concord, Massachusetts to DC, trying to finagle a free ticket and convinced she will drown during the journey.

Mary Somerville née Fairfax (1780-1872), was a self-taught mathematician and polymath from Jedburgh in Scotland. She is the person for whom the word scientist was invented. She studied mathematics and astronomy and was admitted as one of the first female members of the Royal Astronomical Society, together with Caroline Herschel. She was also a tutor and friend to Ada Lovelace.

Mary Wollstonecraft is the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. She has been called Britain’s first feminist. Her daughter Mary Shelley is the author of the novel Frankenstein (1818). This biography was written by Elizabeth Robin Pennell. It was her first book, written before she was thirty. She was married that year to illustrator and artist Joseph Pennell.

“At the beginning I was only a little mass of possibilities. It was my teacher who unfolded and developed them.” The Story of My Life, Helen Keller’s autobiography, is the story of that unfolding. It is the story of how, with Anne Sullivan as her guide, Keller developed from “a mass of possibilities” to become one of the most beloved and admired women in American history. With intelligence, humor and wisdom, Keller describes her passage, “from darkness into light, from isolation to friendship, companionship, knowledge, love.”

Sarah Merriman is just like any other urbane young woman in her twenties... She has a job in a Central London hotel, a boyfriend, commutes to work on the Tube, eats out, goes to films and theatre... This is all the more remarkable (though not to her) because Sarah was born with Down's Syndrome. Her parents having no prior inkling, it came as a huge shock to them that they now had a daughter with a disability. In 1999 her father Andy wrote a frank and moving book, A Minor Adjustment, about the challenge of her early years. Now he continues with this inspirational story.

A glimpse into the life of Elizabeth Fenton appeared in print in 1901 when her early diaries of colonial life in India and arrival in Van Dieman's Land were edited and published in London. Now Mrs. Fenton's direct descendant, Tasmanian journalist Margaretta Pos, reveals the full story of Elizabeth Fenton's life, from her joyful but ultimately tragic life as a well-bred young Anglo-Irish wife in India to her new life as a wife, mother, and grandmother in the still-wild colony of Van Dieman's Land - Tasmania.

Grada was only 17 years old when she met her soulmate, Peter. By 19 she was married and had migrated from Holland to live in Peter’s homeland, Tasmania, Australia. Grada lived her dream - homesteading at the "back of beyond" with the love of her life, six children, and a menagerie of farm animals. In 2000 she and Peter opened a wellness clinic in their back yard. At the pinnacle of her life, Grada was hit by a truck - literally. During the near-death experience that followed, Grada had to make the decision to return to her body.

Author Sarah K. Bolton wrote many wonderful and concise biographies of men and women that had lived and died in her era. She tells the stories from first-hand accounts (hers and others). This biography of one of the most influential nurses who ever lived is masterfully told - from early days attending to dogs to transforming the way we care for the military wounded.

Cathy Waterhouse is a farmer and praise be to DNA, a woman. In 2005, aged 38 and in dire financial straits, she spent a year as the world's most disastrously qualified escort, in order to buy a new Hereford bull and reduce the enormous overdraft which her sheep were, in the main, responsible for. It was a terrifying decision for a country girl whose raunchiest moment was giving the local farmer's son a hand job in his milking parlour.