Women’s History Month: Our Favorite Biographies

Last year for Women’s History Month, we discussed some of our favorite women in history. This year we’d thought we’d bring you some of our favorite biographies and biopics.

RHG: Television has given us some lavish biopics of Royal women recently – Victoria (about Queen Victoria) and The Crown, about Elizabeth II. Like all biopics, there’s some fast and loose history at play, but the concept of how these two young women become Queen and how they learn to balance their personal lives with the public demands of their position is fascinating. Also, both series are GORGEOUS.

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management
A | BN | K | AB
I am currently reading a biography about Isabella Beeton, the “Mrs. Beeton” that wrote the handbook that British Victorian women used to run their households. Even though she died four years after the initial publication of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, it continued to be updated and a best seller until the early 20th century. It’s still in print (I have a copy).

But as for who the actual Isabella was, well, that’s been a lot of work for her biographers due to family fights and the lack of documentation of a young woman’s life in general. But the effect she and her work has had on women and their lives is basically incalculable. For good and for ill, her’s was a book that tells you ALL THE THINGS you should know to run a household, but also lists ALL THE THINGS you should be doing to run your household. Nevermind that for the vast majority of this book’s publishing history, no one was doing all of these things. All the pressure!

Another biography I enjoyed in much the same vein (you may notice a theme?) is Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Brought America the Joy of Cooking. Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker were mother and daughter, and it’s the story of a woman who originally just wanted to self-publish a cookbook to help support her family. What you get is the story of a mother-daughter relationship, through MANY ups and downs, and a book that changed how America cooks. In terms of social history, The Joy of Cooking is one of those watershed moments, and so often we don’t get the story of the women who changed the world.

Elyse: I am always interested in the history of a maligned women — the actual history, not the bullshit history we’re all taught. I found The Witches by Stacy Schiff fascinating. It can be a little dry at times (and if you’re looking for a definitive “why” the Salem witch hysteria happened, you won’t get it here). Schiff explores how the accusers, mostly young women, assumed a role of tremendous power in a community that didn’t value them as much beyond a commodity. It’s a really in depth look at gender politics in 1692 New England.

If you’re really into Netflix’s The Crown, you might try Elizabeth The Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch by Sally Bedell Smith. Smith makes Queen Elizabeth a more approachable figure than she appears in the media and also offers a glimpse in the daily life of royalty.

If you prefer fictionalized biographies, then I recommend Empress Orchid by Anchee Min. It’s a first person account of the life of Empress Dowager Cixi as she first comes to marry the emperor. It’s part love story, part auto-biography and deeply satisfying. Empress Dowager Cixi effectively rule China from 1861 to 1908, and she’s a controversial figure –some blame her for the downfall of the Qing dynasty, and others claim that had she been a man, she wouldn’t have been so criticized. Min continues her story in The Last Empress.

Sarah: I love documentaries in so many ways, and keep a list of ones I want to see in a notebook. I add to the list constantly. Alas, a number of the documentaries I encounter via streaming services I already pay for feature dudes. Lots of dudes.

For example, I watched one, Baristaabout the national barista competition. Look at the cover image, and you can see why I was curious. But alas, it featured mostly dudes, even though, for me, the most compelling person was easily Eden-Marie Abramowicz.

On my list to watch that I haven’t seen yet: Sophia Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, about Sophia Loren; Anita, about Anita Hill; Vessel, about Rebecca Gomperts, a doctor who sought to perform safe abortions to women aboard a ship thereby avoiding restrictive laws in several European countries; A Ballerina’s Tale, about Misty Copeland; and Miss Representation, about the media’s pervasive sexism – not technically a biography, though it is about all of us.

Also in the “about a lot of women not just one” category is the documentary Dark Girls, about the prejudice faced by women with dark skin. One of my closest friends from college just completed her MFA with a project on images of Black women in the media, and she used this documentary as part of her thesis.

And while I have exactly zero objectivity for this one, I also recommend Love Between the Covers, a documentary about the romance genre (which I’m in briefly).

RHG: Carrie has done a series of posts of Kickass Women in History, which I highly recommend you check out. Some of the names were familiar, but a lot more were new to me!

Carrie has also reviewed a number of biographies, and I asked her to pick her three favorites.  After some gnashing of teeth (“NO I LOVES THEM ALL”) she made her choices:

  1. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy by Karen Abbott, about four women who were spies and undercover soldiers during the Civil War.
  2. Charity and Sylvia by Rachel Hope Cleves, about two women who functionally formed a same-sex marriage in Early America
  3. The Secret History of the Mongol Queens by Jack Weatherford, which covers the history of women who led the Mongol Empire from 1206 to 1509.

Other bios Carrie has reviewed include multiple Brontes, Lady Byron, Shirley Jackson, and the women who worked at the Harvard Observatory.

We’ve also reviewed a number of biopics about women in our movie reviews:

What about you? What are your recommendations? What bios, either literary or visual, have you loved and want more people to read or see?  

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  1. Vasha says:

    Excited about this question– I actually have a very large collection of women’s biographies (most of them not yet read alas). I will first name some that I loved, and then the ones that I’m most looking forward to.

    The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway. Her description of her childhood in remote rural Australia is also a meditation on the relationship of settlers to the land, and she then goes on to talk about the culture shock of moving to the city, and about becoming a historian. So much to think about.

    Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. Brittain clearly depicts the naivete that she and other Edwardian English women and men grew up with… and then tears that naivete to shreds as World War I arrives, she works as a nurse, and all the men she loves are killed. She ends the war in a state of numb trauma, and I found her account of building herself back up again equally compelling. She becomes a political activist and one of the first women to be granted a degree from Oxford; it is a thick and thorough book, but it fascinated me throughout.

    The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. If you want angry women… Kingston scorches the pages. She talks about her life in a Chinese-American community and also the lives of her mother, her aunt, and other female relatives.

    Red Azalea by Anchee Min. The author has a remarkable style that took me a bit to get used to but then really drew me into her distinctive thinking. It’s a bitterly revealing depiction of life in Cultural Revolution China, with a very acute way of showing the conflicts between people, and the social forces at work. She doesn’t come off as a particularly sweet person but interesting, she is.

    Ouvrière by Franck Magloire — an oral history dictated by Magloire’s mother Nicole. This hasn’t been translated into English, which is a real shame, because it’s a vivid account from a side of society that doesn’t get into writing very often. Nicole Magloire spent her entire life working in a factory in France, and she has a way of relating not just the details, but what it felt like to live through them.

    Coming attractions: The Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich; A Family of Strangers by Deborah Tall; Woman Between Two Worlds: Portrait of an Ethiopian Rural Leader by Judith Olmstead; The Notorious Life of Gyp by Willa Z. Silverman; Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff; Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir; The Smart: The True Story of Margaret Caroline Rudd and the Unfortunate Perreau Brothers by Sarah Bakewell; She’s Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan; The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain’s Journey by Linda Greenlaw; Peregrinations of a Pariah by Flora Tristan………

  2. MirandaB says:

    I’m enjoying Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon. It was reviewed here and is the biography of Mary Wollstonecroft and Mary Shelley. FTR, I think Mary W, would have smacked Percy Shelley around a good bit.

    I like Antonia Fraser’s biographies, particularly Marie Antoinette and Mary, Queen of Scots. Her ‘Weaker Vessel’, about various classes of women in the 17th century, is one of my all-time favorite books.

    Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s ‘Diary of a Midwife’ is excellent. Also read her ‘Good Wives’, about the daily life of puritan/colonial-era women.

    ‘The Gentleman’s Daughter’ by Amanda Vickery is well-done too.

  3. Mona says:

    I am trying to track down Pauline von Metternich’s memoirs: https://en.m.wikipedia./wiki/Pauline_von_Metternich

    She lived from 1836 to 1921 in France, married her uncle, had a happy marriage despite infidelities, and saw a lot of change (well, upper class at least).

    In her fifties she apparently fought a topless* duel with another woman over a disagreement with respect to flower arrangements.

    *topless in context means in chemise and corset according to Wikipedia (sources are US newspapers, and I’d love to find some non-popcultural references).

  4. Rebecca says:

    Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their lives, struggles, and momentous discoveries by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne is a wonderful collection of short bios, which as I recall makes the science very accessible.

    And EVERYONE should read Ida Wells Barnett’s wonderful (and sadly unfinished) autobiography Crusade for Justice. The woman was a true American hero, and she managed to campaign against lynching, start a community center and jobs placement and emergency housing program, fight for the right to vote and then organize women voters, and run a newspaper, all while raising a family, who were deeply supportive of her work. (Her husband is a near invisible but always supportive presence in the book, but it’s clear they adored each other.)

  5. Barb in Maryland says:

    I’d like to recommend a group bio “Rise of the Rocket Girls” by Nathalia Holt. It is about the math savvy women who worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) from its post-WWII beginning through today. The author focuses on 4 women per decade, covering their professional lives as well as their personal ones. I found it fascinating. Makes a nice companion to “Hidden Figures”

  6. Alex says:

    seconding Testament of Youth! It is an amazing look at how women’s lives were during that time period.

  7. PamG says:

    I’m reading Notorious RBG at the moment and enjoying it immensely.

    I’m not a huge biography reader, but I did enjoy Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford. Millay was my mom’s favorite poet (also one of mine) when she was young, and reading it helped me place my mother in her era and understand the things that were important to her.

  8. Theresa says:

    I always recommend Jill Lepore’s fabulous Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin.

    And for those who like Karen Abbott’s book about Civil War spies, they could check out my Angels of the Underground: The American Women Who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II.

  9. Susan says:

    I’m glad to see two mentions of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Midwife’s Tale. I’ve read it several times since it first came out in 1990 (!) and have given several copies as gifts. In addition to being addictively readable, it’s an amazing small-scale social history that was very eye-opening to me and my preconceptions about early America. (I have vague recollections of a PBS adaptation, as well.)

    I used to devour biographies and historical fiction, and this post has really whetted my appetite to delve back in. Great recommendations–thanks!

  10. Karin says:

    I second The Road From Coorain, it’s a book that I push into people’s hands, and the Jill Lepore book about Jane Franklin.
    These autobiographies are out of print, but worth looking for: “A Fine Old Conflict” by Jessica Mitford. She was an investigative journalist, and one of the scandalous British Mitford sisters. Her sister Nancy was a well known novelist, another sister became the Duchess of Devonshire, and another sister married the leader of the British Fascist Party. It’s very funny and colorful. Her other books are good too, like “Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckracking”.
    Also “I Speak My Own Piece” by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. She was a labor leader, activist and feminist in the early 20th century, also a founding member of the ACLU.

  11. Maureen says:

    I am a huge fan of all things Mitford, so I love seeing the recommendations in the comments! Nancy Mitford is one of my go to comfort reads, but I highly recommend reading the nonfiction books about the family.

    A Girl Named Zippy, and She Got Up Off The Couch-by Haven Kimmel-big favorites of mine. I read A Girl Named Zippy when we were on vacation at WDW-my husband ran for a bus, tripped, and broke his arm. I was reading the book in his hospital room, waiting for him to go to surgery, and laughing my ass off! There was my husband in a drug induced haze, maybe not the most appropriate time to be laughing at a book. I know my fellow readers will understand!

    Eleanor of Aquitaine is a real heroine of mine-I love both fiction and nonfiction books about her. Alison Weir writes great nonfiction-and her novel about her is excellent. Elizabeth Chadwick is one of the best historical fiction writers today, in my opinion-and her trilogy of Eleanor is outstanding.

    Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is a wonderful book by Alexandra Fuller-her family fascinates me, and her life growing up in Africa is amazing.

    I love classic movies, and one of my very favorite books is Life is A Banquet by Rosalind Russell. I challenge any woman to read this and not fall in love with her. Her growing up stories about how she interacted with men, she did the “I’m a better man than you!” kind of flirting, is hilarious. If you like the golden age of Hollywood, really-if you enjoy reading about strong and funny women, this book is a must!

  12. KateB says:

    I second absolutely “Testament of Youth” and “Romantic Outlaws”, like a million percent.
    Some of my other faves

    – “Wild Heart: A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris” by Suzanne Rodriguez – writer, poet, salonist, notorious seducer of ladies. I have a tattoo on my arm because of this book.
    – “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name” by Audre Lorde – writer, poet, Black lesbian, this memoir is about Lorde’s childhood and early adulthood in 1920’s-50’s New York

    – “Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster” by Alison Weir – wife of John of Gaunt, with whom she had a legendary love affair, and subject of “Katherine” by Anya Seton

    – “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot – soon to be a movie!

    – “Eve’s Hollywood” by Eve Babitz – journalist, writer, It Girl of the late 60’s, this is a sharp and fun and gossipy memoir in essays of Babitz’s childhood and early adulthood in Hollywood

    – “Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark” – travel writer, born 1893, died 1993, she wrote and traveled throughout the Middle East

    – “By Myself and Then Some” by Lauren Bacall – I cried and I honestly wasn’t expecting to.

  13. Stefanie Magura says:

    I mentioned this in the last Whatcha Reading Post, but I can’t recommend enough the book by Shaun Concidine called Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud on Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. I also can’t recommend highly enough the TV show feud whose current and first of hopefully many seasons covers this feud. Jessica Lange is especially knocking it out of the park as Crawford.

  14. Stefanie Magura says:

    Flappers: Six Dangerous Women of a Generation by Judith Mackrell is also a good book discussing the 1920’s through the lives of six women: Tallulah Bankhead, Josephine Baker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Diana Cooper (Nee Manners), Nancy Cunard, and Tamara De Lempica. Bankhead, Baker, and Fitzgerald may be the best known of these women, but they are all interesting.

  15. Kim W. says:

    If you like Rise of the Rocket Girls and Hidden Figures, I’d recommend Girls of the Atomic City. It’s about the young women (and men, but it’s primarily about the women) who moved to the Appalachia during World War II to work in a uranium enrichment facility so top secret that the vast majority didn’t know what they were actually working on. There’s a rich sense of place, as well as the excitement and sacrifice these women experienced (and always in the background, the post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki hindsight we have now).

  16. West With the Night, by Beryl Markham.

    *Some people think her then-husband, Raoul Schumacher, a Hollywood screenwriter, helped her with what was billed as an autobiography; she had little formal education and didn’t seem to people who knew her that she could come up with such a lyrical book. I prefer to think she had an extensive informal education and knew how to tell a good story, and someone else just wrote them down for her. History has always been crediting women’s work to the men in their lives, after all. Certainly even if Raoul ‘wrote’ it, she had to tell him the stories, because he wasn’t there.

    There are six or eight other books that focus on her, including scholarly biographies, annotated/illustrated versions of West With the Night, and fictional stories featuring her and the whole “Happy Valley” Isak Dinesen set (ie, the Meryl Streep movie Out of Africa). There is a relatively new one out now too – basically, the list of books about her should tell you that the original is a pretty good read. Don’t start with them. Start with West With the Night, because it’s the original.

    Yes, West With the Night has all the issues in a book written in 1942 about by and about Europeans in Kenya. Yes, in her stories about being a white child in Kenya in the 1920s, the adult Africans are not handled in the same way as her relationship with whites. I read it several times in the 90s and early 00s, and I’ve dipped in lately, but I haven’t reread front to back in the last several years – so the colonialism aspect may be worse than I remember, and YMMV. But I remember how much she loved Africa, which the book really makes into a vital part of the story, and she loved being a pilot. She pays little attention, frankly, to the society of the colonial strata – unless it’s horse racing – mostly just flying around and getting in and out of scrapes with planes. You wouldn’t even know she was part of that whole Isak Dinesen group of spouse-swappers if you didn’t know it from other sources, because she doesn’t talk much about it (fails the Bechdel test, let me say – I think she spends more print on her dogs than on any female friends).

    If you like Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, I think you’d like this – it’s less of the family drama, much less, as if the same character in the same sort of location and situations had just closed the door on the messy private stuff and said “Indeed? Well, shall I tell you about my recent flight out…” and deflected all your questions about the bad behavior of the family in the background. But the landscape and her adventures are amazing.

    Also – people speak really highly of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, about her travels through and studies of Yugoslavia before WWII. The Penguin version even has an introduction by the late Christopher Hitchens. I took it with me on a Balkans deployment, but mostly used it to weigh down my folded shirts – so I can’t say whether it’s your cup of tea. But it is a woman who had adventures and wrote her own story.

  17. Wish I could edit my piece above to include this link to an NPR piece about West With the Night (glad to see I’m not the only one who was crazy about Beryl Markham in her 20s!):

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102496707

  18. Morgan Grantwood says:

    “Eleanor of Acquitaine and the Four Kings” by Amy Kelly is really the gold standard of stuff on Eleanor. It reads like a novel, but it’s not.

    Alison Weir’s bios of Elizabeth I and Mary Of Scotland are terrific.

  19. KateB says:

    @Anna Richland – “West with the Night” is so good!

  20. cleo says:

    My mother read me picture book biographies of American women to celebrate the bicentennial when I was 6 and that started a life long love of biographies and memoirs.

    I highly recommend Unbowed by Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan feminist, environmentalist, and activist for good government who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. It’s incredibly compelling – she lived a remarkable life – from living through the Mau Mau uprisings and the British reprisals as a child to going to college in the US through a scholarship program set up by JFK to her activism against corruption in Kenya. It also gives insight in Kenyan history from colonialism to 2006. I think it’d be a good companion to the Beryl Markham.

  21. Stefanie Magura says:

    And I keep getting the information for the book about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford wrong. The author is Shaun Considine. Gees getting names right can be tough. And I should know because I have one that people mes up on occasion.

  22. Louise says:

    How unnerving to find Mrs Beeton staring me in the face when I’ve only just finished putting the Book of Household Management online–a task that took the better part of the year. I always like to learn something about what I’m working on, so I too have recently read The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes, available at any self-respecting public library.

    The library also came through when an illustrated edition of Little Women prompted me to read the dual biography Marmee & Louisa by Eve LaPlante. (The starting premise is that Bronson Alcott can’t have been that much of an influence on Louisa, since he was never there. So let’s take a closer look at that other parent.) Remember the episode in Little Women where, to teach the girls a lesson, Marmee takes a week off? She says casually “I never liked housekeeping”. This has got to be a rare glimpse of the real-life Marmee speaking in her own voice.

    Luckily my local library lets volunteers do interlibrary loans for free, because other biographies involved university libraries at the opposite end of the state.

    Two travel books and the cheesy classic Ramona led to a biography of the writer now known as Helen Hunt Jackson.

    The long-forgotten novel Mona Maclean, Medical Student led to a biography of Sophia Jex-Blake, leader of the Edinburgh Seven (really eleven by the time they were through)–the group of women who, starting in 1869, fought to be allowed to study medicine at Edinburgh University. The male establishment eventually put a stop to it, forcing Jex-Blake to found two separate medical schools for women–one of them in Edinburgh, haha.

    And that’s just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. I’m still looking for a really solid biography of Florence Nightingale, who was a much stronger personality than the things done in her name would lead you to expect. (After about the fifteenth time that she stresses how much an “intelligent and observant” nurse can help the doctor, you have to pick up the subtext: the doctor needs to listen to the nurse.) In the meantime, I read the one by Elspeth Huxley.

  23. I almost never read biographies, but I wanted to remedy that recently and read Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, which is quite excellent. She was an author, but also a housewife raising four kids. She and her husband were well suited to each other intellectually, but he was always a womanizer, which caused her a great deal of anguish. It was quite fascinating and very well-written and now I want to read more Shirley Jackson.

    If anyone hasn’t watched Love Between the Covers, which Sarah mentions above, I highly recommend it! My library subscribes to hoopla so I was able to watch it for free. I enjoyed it a lot!

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