Her Own Place

Dori Sanders' first novel, CLOVER was a smash hit. Now, with HER OWN PLACE, Dori Sanders tells a story about ordinary people taking part in a transformation of heart and mind--in the South, in the nation. "Resonates as powerfully as an old hymn."--Kirkus Reviews; "Like a ripe summer peach, HER OWN PLACE just keeps getting better and better until the last page leaves the reader longing for more."--Christian Science Monitor. A LITERARY GUILD SELECTION.

A Room of One’s Own is an essay written by Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1929 and is based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at two colleges for women at Cambridge. In this famous essay, Woolf addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular. In this essay, the author also asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. According to Woolf, women’s creativity has been curtailed due to centuries of prejudice and financial and educational disadvantages. To emphasize her view, she offers the example of an imaginary gifted but uneducated sister of William Shakespeare, who, discouraged from all eventually kills herself. Woolf celebrates the work of women who have overcome that tradition and become writers, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. In the final section Woolf suggests that great minds are neutral and argues that intellectual freedom requires financial freedom. The author entreats her audience to write not only fiction but poetry, criticism, and scholarly works as well.

After leaving home at a young age and defying her parents to marry the dashing Garrett Maupin, Martha Maupin's future became bound up with some of the most extraordinary events in antebellum American history, eventually leading to her journey to a new life on the Oregon Trail. After Garrett Maupin died in 1866, leaving her alone on the frontier with their many children, Martha Maupin was torn between grief and relief after a difficult marriage. Lone mothers had few options in her day, but she took charge of her own dream and bought her own place, which is now one of the few Century Farms in Oregon named for a woman. A Place of Her Own is the story of the author’s great-great-grandmother’s daring decision to buy that farm on the Oregon frontier after the death of her husband--and story of the author's own decision to keep that farm in the family. Janet Fisher's journey into the past to uncover her own family history as she worked to keep the property interweaves with the tales from her ancestors' lives during the years leading up to the Mexican-American War in the East and her great-great-grandmother's harrowing journey across the Oregon Trail with her young family and finally tells the tale of Martha's courageous decision to strike out on her own in Oregon. This book will hold special appeal for Oregon Trail buffs and the many people in this country whose ancestors took that terrible trek, as well as others interested in American history of that period.

Illustrated with more than 100 color photographs, A Home of Her Own showcases a wide variety of homes and tells the stories of their making.

Since the founding of the United States, women have picked up their pens to write and express their ideas, affording them independence and self-sufficiency in days when they had little. By way of their poetry, essays, advice columns, investigative journalism and more, women like Helen Keller, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Shirley Jackson wrote not only to entertain and inform, but often to simply keep a roof over their heads. This text offers a unique examination of female New England writers, focusing on their homes. The women wrote in many genres and became literary entrepreneurs, bargaining with editors for higher fees and royalties, participating in marketing campaigns, and seeking advice and help. The homes women bought with their earnings included cottages, suburban houses, farms, and an occasional mansion. Whether modest or luxurious, these houses provided the "room of her own" that Virginia Woolf said every woman needs in order to write. Sometimes that room was an elegant study, and sometimes a corner of the kitchen.

Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction From Chicago to Mexico, the places Sandra Cisneros has lived have provided inspiration for her now-classic works of fiction and poetry. But a house of her own, a place where she could truly take root, has eluded her. In this jigsaw autobiography, made up of essays and images spanning three decades-and including never-before-published work-Cisneros has come home at last. Written with her trademark lyricism, in these signature pieces the acclaimed author of The House on Mango Street and winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature shares her transformative memories and reveals her artistic and intellectual influences. Poignant, honest, and deeply moving, A House of My Own is an exuberant celebration of a life lived to the fullest, from one of our most beloved writers.