Female Biographies
Top 10 Female Biographies
: Marie Antoinette: The Journey, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Wives of Henry VIII, The Life of Elizabeth I, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, The Tigress of Forlì: Renaissance Italy's Most Courageous and Notorious Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de Medici, Nefertiti: An Archaeological Biography, Madame de Pompadour
Marie Antoinette: The Journey
| Author | Antonia Fraser |
| ISBN | 0307277747 |
Brilliantly written, a work of impeccable scholarship. An utterly riveting and intensely moving book by one of our finest biographers.
Never before has the life of Marie Antoinette been told so intimately and with such authority as in Antonia Fraser's newest work, Marie Antoinette: The...
Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life
| Author | Alison Weir |
| ISBN | 0345434870 |
In this beautifully written biography, Alison Weir paints a vibrant portrait of a truly exceptional woman and provides new insights into her intimate world.
Renowned in her time for being the most beautiful woman in Europe, the wife of two kings and mother of three, Eleanor of Aquitaine was...
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
| Author | Maya Angelou |
| ISBN | 0553279378 |
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many...
| Author | Antonia Fraser |
| ISBN | 0140132937 |
In a sweeping narrative, Fraser traces the cultural, familial and political roots of each of Henry's queens, pushes aside the stereotypes that have long defined them, and illuminates the complex character of each. The result is a superb work of history through which these six women become as memorable...
| Author | Alison Weir |
| ISBN | 0345425502 |
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Perhaps the most influential sovereign England has ever known, Queen Elizabeth I remained an extremely private person throughout her reign, keeping her own counsel and sharing secrets with no one--not even her closest, most trusted advisers. Now, in this brilliantly...
She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth
| Author | Helen Castor |
| ISBN | 0571237053 |
When Edward VI - Henry VIII’s longed-for son - died in 1553, extraordinarily, there was no one left to claim the title King of England. For the first time, all the contenders for the crown were female.
In 1553, England was about to experience the ‘monstrous regiment’ - the unnatural rule...
| Author | Elizabeth Gaskell |
| ISBN | 0192838059 |
Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. Gaskell was a friend of Bronte's and, having been invited to write the official life, determined to both tell the truth and honor her friend. This edition collates all...
| Author | Elizabeth Lev |
| ISBN | 0151012997 |
The astonishing life of a long-misunderstood Renaissance virago.Wife, mother, leader, warrior. Caterina Riario Sforza was one of the most prominent women in Renaissance Italy—and one of the most vilified. In this glittering biography, Elizabeth Lev reexamines her extraordinary life and accomplishments.Raised...
Nefertiti: An Archaeological Biography
Zij is en blijft een van de meest raadselachtige vrouwen uit de wereldgeschiedenis. Waar zij vandaan kwam, hoe en waar haar opwindende 'leven tot een einde kwam - we zullen de waarheid wel nooit te weten komen. Alleen al haar naam 'Nefertete de schoonheid die opdoemt` - is voor verschillende uitleg vatbaar....
When Madame de Pompadour became the mistress of Louis XV, no one expected her to retain his affections for long. A member of the bourgeoisie rather than an aristocrat, she was physically too cold for the carnal Bourbon king, and had so many enemies that she could not travel publicly without risking a pelting...
| Author | Antonia Fraser |
| ISBN | 1842126369 |
Antonia Fraser's Warrior Queens are those women who have both ruled and led in war. They include Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, Isabella of Spain, the Rani of Jhansi, and the formidable Queen Jinga of Angola. With Boadicea as the definitive example, her female champions from other ages and civilisations...
Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family
| Author | Miep Gies |
| ISBN | 0671662341 |
If a person has heard Miep Gies speak, this book is extactly like her speech. She may have a co-author, but her voice comes though loud and clear.
Like the documentry about Anne Frank, this book does much in dispelling some of the myths that surrond the Frank family and thier assoicates. In many...
| Author | Mineko Iwasaki |
| ISBN | 0743444299 |
"No woman in the three-hundred-year history of the karyukai has ever come forward in public to tell her story. We have been constrained by unwritten rules not to do so, by the robes of tradition and by the sanctity of our exclusive calling...But I feel it is time to speak out."
Celebrated as the...
The Kings' Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin
| Author | Elizabeth C. Goldsmith |
| ISBN | 1586488899 |
The Mancini Sisters, Marie and Hortense, were born in Rome, brought to the court of Louis XIV of France, and strategically married off by their uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, to secure his political power base. Such was the life of many young women of the age: they had no independent status under the law and...
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
| Author | Alison Bechdel |
| ISBN | 0618871713 |
In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had...
| Author | Hermione Lee |
| ISBN | 0375701362 |
While Virginia Woolf--one of our century's most brilliant and mercurial writers--has had no shortage of biographers, none has seemed as naturally suited to the task as Hermione Lee. Subscribing to Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from...
| Author | Laura Ingalls Wilder |
| ISBN | 0060885459 |
Laura Ingalls Wilder is beginning life with her new husband, Almanzo, in their own little house. Laura is a young pioneer wife now, and must work hard with Almanzo, farming the land around their home on the South Dakota prairie. Soon their baby daughter, Rose, is born, and the young family must face the...
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
| Author | Simone de Beauvoir |
| ISBN | 0060825197 |
A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking...
Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson
| Author | Nigel Nicolson |
| ISBN | 0226583570 |
Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet, and biographer, is best known as the friend of Virginia Woolf, who transformed her into an androgynous time-traveler in Orlando. The story of Sackville-West's marriage to Harold Nicolson is one of intrigue and bewilderment. In Portrait of a Marriage, their...
Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman
| Author | Stefan Zweig |
| ISBN | 0802139094 |
Life at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette has long captivated readers, drawn by accounts of the intrigues and pageantry that came to such a sudden and unexpected end. Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman is a dramatic account of the guillotine's most famous victim,...
A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains
| Author | Isabella Lucy Bird |
| ISBN | 0806113286 |
A cosmopolitan, middle-aged Englishwoman touring the Rocky Mountains in 1873, Isabella Bird had embarked upon a trip that called for as much stamina as would have been expected of an explorer or anthropologist — and she was neither! Possessing a prodigious amount of curiosity and a huge appetite...
| Author | Joy Adamson |
| ISBN | 0151847959 |
Joy Adamson, world-famous for her books about Elsa the lioness, has a new and enthralling story to tell. Its heroine is Pippa, an elegant, affectionate but enigmatic cheetah - the spotted sphinx.
"Mrs. Adamson is confirmed as one of the most remarkable women of her times... I believe The Spotted...
| Author | Christine Pevitt |
| ISBN | 0802140351 |
This biography of the legendary mistress of King Louis XV offers dramatic insight into the life of one of the most enchanting, powerful, and feared women to grace the world's stage. Groomed from an early age to assume the role of a rich man's mistress, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson underwent several transformations...
