How Women Write History: Five Female Tenants and Pioneers of Freedom in War-torn London Author: Francesca Wade Translator: Lin Ye Democracy and Construction Press Popular Non-fiction Books of the Week

Please make those voices heard.

Five ambitious female tenants

Cutting through the darkness

Just so sisters can recognize each other in the light

A struggle to be treated with respect.

I see you and me in the book

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She is one of the founders of Imagism and the first female poet in history to receive the Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She was one of the first female graduates of Oxford University, a master of mystery novels, and the mother of "Lord Wimsey"

She was the first "female professional scholar" to obtain a full-time university teaching position in England, a landmark figure in classical studies

She was the first woman to receive the Albert Kahn World Travel Scholarship and spent her life advocating for peace

She is a representative of stream-of-consciousness literature, and wrote "To the Lighthouse" and "A Room of One's Own".

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They have something in common that is well known - defending the power of women to write history

They also have something in common that is unknown to the public: they are “neighbors beyond time and space” in the same community.

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○ Half a century of social and literary history is condensed into the forgotten lives of these five women, reminding us that women must write their stories to the future with different voices.

This book inherits Woolf's unfinished ambition of "writing different histories" and records the lives of five great women. The book not only records their personal emotions and private lives in the living room, but also records their careers, political ideas, literary achievements and social groups. The book also inevitably involves war, and this era background profoundly affects the fate of each of them.

In their own lives and works, these women try to find the lifestyles they desire in a society that still rejects female power, believes that women’s needs and desires are different from men’s, and places expectations on women accordingly.

○ They chose to deviate from the traditional way of life, walked out of the "different" life model, and became a minority

The lives of these women in the book have all been full of contradictions and even deep pain, but when their life pictures slowly unfolded in front of me, I was moved by their determination to forge a new life model. These lives may be different, they are complex, diverse, and sometimes even dangerous, but they are all based on the pursuit of personal independence and a deep love of knowledge.

The women in this book are hungry for knowledge in all its forms: knowledge of history and literature, knowledge of the wider world, and no simpler awareness of themselves. They all explore "female territory" through education, travel, friendship, work, and home decoration.

Their relentless quest for a fulfilling life path reverberated throughout the twentieth century, and the dilemma of “having it both ways” remains a constant in our minds today, with the ideal of both personal fulfillment and emotional satisfaction remaining elusive.

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Contents:

Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961): Modern Poet

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), mystery novelist

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), classicist, translator

Irene Ball (1889-1940), historian, broadcaster, pacifist

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), writer and publisher

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, a group of women declared their willingness to actively pursue spiritual depth and intellectual development, which is known as the first wave of the women's movement.

The author visited Bloomsbury, a pioneer of modern European thought, in London, and found five unusual female tenants living in the same community during the World War. They chose a place to live and invested in a new way of life to love and live. This small discovery accidentally opened up a magnificent private history of wartime women. By digging out clues from a large number of historical materials and literary works, the author faithfully restored the whole process of how they responded to the anxiety and challenges of women's lives and careers in different ways and completed their most prestigious masterpieces.

This group biography focuses on revealing the power of female writing and how everyone can be a writer of the times - there is no cost, no threshold, and even the most private writing has public significance. "Writing is about regaining dominance."

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Celebrity/Media Recommendations:

"I will recommend this book all year long!"

—Sarah Bakewell (author of The Existentialist Café)

“This book explores issues of love, community, friendship, and intellectual work in times of crisis while focusing on the lives of five extraordinary women. Beautiful and deeply moving.”

——Sally Rooney (author of Normal People and Chat Logs)

"This book makes me wish I was one of that generation of pioneering women who ruined the taboo by ruining eggs on the gas ring."

——Sue Prideaux (Winner of the Centenary Hawthornden Literary Prize, winner of the Times Biography of the Year, author of I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche)

“Just as Harrison and Ball rewrote history to include the lives of forgotten women, Wade reestablishes the importance of thinkers like Ball and HD, whose legacies have been overshadowed by their male contemporaries.”

—The New Yorker

"I will give this book to every female college graduate around me who is thinking about her own development."

—The Times

“Wade offers a timely invitation to join our literary forebears in their rebellious journey toward creative freedom and harmony in the world.”

——The New York Times Book Review

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Awards:

★The Sunday Times Non-Fiction Book of the Year★

★The Guardian's Best Book of the Year★

★New York Times Editor's Choice Award★

★The Biographers Club Tony Lothian Award★

★PopMatters Book of the Year★

★Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Award (shortlisted)★

★Berry Gifford Literature Award (Shortlisted)★

About the Author