Joanna Biggs, formerly an editor at the LRB, is deputy editor of the Yale Review. A Life of One’s Own was published in 2023.
On campus everyone wore jeans but in the city everyone wore mink, Simone de Beauvoir observed when she visited Vassar College to give a talk in February 1947. The reason, she thought, was that American women dress to tell the world about their standard of living, or to make men stare: ‘The truth is that the way European women dress is much less servile.’ If being a young woman in...
On the afternoon of 14 March, as the National People’s Congress was coming to an end in Beijing, men huddled to play cards in Hanzhongmen Square, Nanjing. Washing was spread over hedges to dry, tiny dusty birds sang in cages hung from the branches of trees, dogs fought, babies were sung to by their grandmothers and a street-sweeper stopped to help a man lift an iron bar. That evening,...
I sort of find it heart warming. Bored mother of two teenage boys has midlife crisis and instead of buying a car, moving to Oaxaca or having an affair, she writes raunchy Twilight fan fiction for two years. When she’s finished she changes the names from Bella and Edward to Anastasia and Christian and a small Australian e-book publisher puts it out: success enough for anyone with a midlife crisis novel, especially someone who wrote under the unlikely handle ‘Snowqueens Icedragon’. But that’s not all.
On the cover of Aftermath, Rachel Cusk’s divorce memoir, there’s a drawing of a jigsaw. It’s the classic pattern, the one in which all the pieces – reaching out on two sides and sucked in on the others – are the same, and fit together at right angles. The book begins: ‘Recently my husband and I separated, and over the course of a few weeks the life that...
When Jane Austen became famous at the age of 38, she didn’t go to literary lunches, meet her readers or take tea with Madame de Staël. But she did accept one invitation, from the Prince Regent’s librarian: the Prince Regent was a fan – would she like to come and look round his library? After the visit, the librarian, who had been a clergyman, wrote to her: had she...
Marguerite Yourcenar entered the Académie Française in 1981, the first woman to be admitted. Her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, published thirty years earlier, is ‘often considered the best French novel...
Toril Moi talks to Joanna Biggs about the French philosopher Simone Weil, whose short and uncompromising life became a workshop for her revolutionary ideas about labour, human suffering and the power...
Jenny Turner talks to Joanna Biggs about the history of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the loneliness of feminist work, and the seemingly unavoidable question: How do you think your life compares to...
Joanna Biggs talks to Thomas Jones about the life of Simone de Beauvoir.
Susan Pedersen talks to Joanna Biggs about Shelagh Delaney and her landmark 1958 play, A Taste of Honey.
Nell Dunn and Tessa Hadley talk to Joanna Biggs about fictional representations of women’s everyday lives, as part of our 40th anniversary event series.
Mark and Seamus are joined by Joanna Biggs, an editor at the LRB, to look at Sylvia Plath's life and poetry.
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