Author: Joanna Biggs
When author Joanna Biggs’ marriage fell apart, she went to her bookshelf to pick up the pieces. She pulled books by often-considered legendary, well-established figures — women whose names define eras — but Biggs approached them through a more focused, personal lens, searching for how each of them rebuilt their lives and their identities through writing.
The result is “A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again,” published in 2023.
Part memoir-part criticism and full of reflective introspection, Biggs re-examined the works of these women who had shaped her life. Beyond just the literary influences, she wanted to learn how they began again and again after disappointment — like many of us must in our own lives.
These are Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans’s pen name), Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante. As she puts it, the women are all taken down from their pedestals, their work and lives seen in a new light.
Biggs has a chapter dedicated to each of them, offering a nuanced way to dissect the different ways in which these women seemingly rebuilt, re-created and re-claimed their worlds. They each carved out a new life of her own.
As deputy editor of the Yale Review, Biggs has built a distinguished career in literary publishing. She previously worked at the London Review of Books for 15 years and was a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine. Her aforementioned book was a finalist for the 2023 National Award for Arts Writing.
Years prior, in 2017, she co-founded Silver Press, a platform dedicated to publishing feminist writers, demonstrating her commitment to amplifying women’s voices throughout her professional life.
Through their stories in this book, Biggs searches for her own story. The narrative moves between biography and confession, drawing out the moments when these women, too, began again.
She finds strength in their contradictions: Wollstonecraft’s pioneering radicalism, Eliot’s sharp intellect, Hurston’s fierce joy, Woolf’s melancholy and clarity, de Beauvoir’s philosophical rigor, Plath’s engulfing emotional intensity, Morrison’s deep faith in language as liberation, and Ferrante’s vivid portrayal of women’s friendship.
Biggs doesn’t just analyze them; she reads them as companions. We all become friends by the last page.
“A Life of One’s Own” is both an homage and an awakening. At the end of the read, you’ll feel as if you’ve understood all eight authors a bit better — Biggs included as the ninth. And perhaps us readers as the 10th.
