Women Writers Posters & Prints, pg 6/10
for the language arts, social studies, history, art and science classrooms and home schoolers.

Selma Lagerlof
b. 11-20-1858, Sweden
d. 3-16-1940

Selma Lagerlof was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1909). She was the author of The Wonderful Adventures of Niles Holgersson, which began as a geography reader for the public schools. Future Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz was very influenced by the book.

FYI - Greta Garbo's first major film role was in the dramatization of Lagerlof's novel Gösta Berlings saga.

Lady Caroline Lamb
née the Honourable Caroline Ponsonby
b. 11-13-1785; England
d. 1-26-1828

Novelist Lady Caroline Lamb is best remembered as having an affair in 1812 with the poet Lord Byron. She described him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace
b. 12-10-1815; England
d. 11-27-1852

Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron. She received early training as a mathematician and is considered to have written the first computer program in her correspondence with Charles Babbage about his early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.

• Ada, Countess of Lovelace

Harper Lee
b. 4-28-1926; Alabama

In late 1956 friends of Harper Lee gave her a year's worth of wages for “one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”

The result was the Pulitzer Prize winning novel ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ that was voted the “Best Novel of the Century” in a 1999 poll by the Library Journal.

Anne “Ninon” de l'Enclos, (Ninon de Lenclos),
b. 11-10-1620; England
d. 10-17-1705

Ninon de l'Enclos, a great beauty who devoted her life to pleasure, was also a patron of literature as well as an author.

FYI - She left a portion of her estate to a 9 year old son of her accountant, he became known as Voltaire.

• Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos The Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century
• Famous Hussies of History: Storiesof the Super-Women

Jane Loudon, née Webb
b. 8-19-1807; England
d. 1858

Jane Loudon is best known for illustrations and co-authoring gardening manuals with her husband, and not for being a pioneer in science fiction. Her novel Mummy! was written to support herself at age 17, when her father died penniless.

• botanists
• more flower posters

Amy Lawrence Lowell
b. 2-9-1874; Brookline, MA
d. 5-12-1925

Amy Lowell was awarded the Pulitizer Prize for Poetry in 1926.

Sea Shell, Sea Shell,
Sing me a song, O Please!
A song of ships, and sailor men,
And parrots, and tropical trees,
Of islands lost in the Spanish Main
Which no man ever may find again,
Of fishes and corals under the waves,
And seahorses stabled in great green caves.
Sea Shell, Sea Shell,
Sing of the things you know so well.

Harriet Martineau,
b. 6-12-1802, England
d. 6-27-1876

Writer Harriet Martineau was a philosopher, journalist, abolitionist and feminist. Because of her deafness, and being an “uneducated” woman, the founding of the science of sociology is attributed to Auguste Comte, and Martineau is considered the “first woman sociologist”.

FYI - An invalid much of her life, Martineau may have been the inspiration for the character of Mrs. Jellyby in Charles Dicken's Bleak House; and an early suitor was Erasmus Darwin, brother of Charles Darwin.

• Harriet Martineau's Autobiography: Vol I

Carson McCullers, née Lula Carson Smith
b. 2-19-1917; Georgia
d. 9-29-1967; New York

• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter/Reflections in a Golden Eye/The Ballad of the Sad Cafe/The Member of the Wedding/The Clock Without Hands

Phyllis McGinley
b. 3-21-1905; Oregon
d. 2-22-1978; New York

Phyllis McGinley wrote children's books and won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

• Times Three, Selected verse from three decades.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
b. 2-22-1892; Rockland, ME
d. 10-19-1950; Austerlitz, New York

Edna St. Vincent Millay was the first woman to be awarded the Pulitize Prize for Poetry, in 1923. Her most memorable poem is “Renascence” (1912) with the lines ...

“I saw and heard and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick’ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not,—nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.” ...

FYI - Millay's middle name, St. Vincent, was given to remember New York's St. Vincent Hospital, where an uncle had been treated.

Gabriela Mistral,
née Lucila Godoy Alcayaga
b. 4-7-1889, Chile
d. 1-10-1957, New York (pancreatic cancer)

Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga. A poet and educator, she was an activist on behalf of homeless children, reorganized the library and rural school systems of Mexico and represent Latin America in the newly formed Institute for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations.

She was also the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945), “for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world.”

• Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral

Nicholasa Mohr
b. 1938; New York

“Summers in New York City’s Barrio were unbearable. Even when there was a cool spell, it seemed a long time before the dry fresh air could find a way past the concrete an asphalt, into the crowded buildings whch had become blazing furnaces.” Nilda

• more Latino Writers posters

Hannah More
b. 2-2-1745; England
d. 9-7-1833

Hannah More, a teacher, religious writer, philanthropist and social reformer, was one of the most influential women of her day. She associated with the intellectual society of England: actor and playwright David Garrick, painter Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and Elizabeth Montagu (Blue Stocking Society); later she influenced abolitionist William Wilberforce. She was accused of “Methodist” tendencies for teaching farm children to read because workers who could read would would leave the farms and that would be “fatal to agriculture”.

• Hannah More: The First Victorian

Marianne Moore
b. 11-15-1887; Kirkwood, MO
d. 2-5-1972; NYC

Marianne Moore's “Collected Poems” of 1951 earned her the Pulitzer Prize. She also served as editor of the literary and cultural journal The Dial.

• Complete Poems, Marianne Moore

Toni Morrison
b. 2-18-1931; Lorain, OH

Poster Text: ... Toni Morrison was born in the small town of Lorain, Ohio, in 1931 and given the name Chloe Anthony Wofford. But for much of her life has used the shortened version of her middle name, Toni. ... As a child, Toni was fascinated by stories. She was one of three black students in her first grade class, and the only student who could read. She remembers how her parents told her wonderfully scary stories, and how her grandmother kept a “dream book” in which she wrote down her dreams and tried to explain what they meant. As a teenager, Toni devoured great novels by writers like Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen. ...

• Toni Morrison posters
• Outstanding Contemporary African Americans posters