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Beware the women who are called witches, or those who claim the name for themselves... Banshees - a howling night-witch and harbinger of death; She-devils - Lilith and her daughters; or Bitches - Hecate, whose chariot is drawn by dogs. Alluring women, enchantresses, seekers of revenge, wise old women and badly-behaved girls. As Shahrukh Husain says, witches are 'womanhood in all its complexity'. Over fifty stories of crones and nixies, shape shifters and beauties are here, including the loving fox witch of Japan; Italy's Witch-Bea-Witch; Scotland's Goodwife of Laggan; Biddy Earl and the terrifying Kali and Baba Yaga who comes in many forms to haunt, entice, possess, transform and challenge. From every corner of the globe, with tom-foolery, fun, strife and victory, these folklore and legends celebrate women who step out of line.
Three hundred years of wanderlust are captured in this beautiful new illustrated edition of the VIRAGO BOOK OF WOMEN TRAVELLERS. Some of the women are observers of the world in which they wander and others are more active. Often they are storytellers, weaving tales about the people they encounter and whether it is curiosity about the world or escape from personal tragedy, these women approached their journeys with wit, intelligence, compassion and empathy for the lives of others. The constraints and perils, the perceptions and complex emotions women journey with are different and for many women, the inner landscape is as important as the outer. This does not mean that the woman traveller is not politically aware, historically astute or in touch with the customs and language of the place but it does mean that a woman cannot travel and not be aware of her body and the limitations her sex presents.
Thirty four spooky stories by classic storytellers of the twentieth century - many from the 1920s and 30s - chill and excite in this classic collection. All of them demonstrate a subtle power to delight and chill at the same time as they explore those ghostly margins of the supernatural which are part of private experience as well as of popular tradition. Authors include Elizabeth Bowen, Angela Carter, Elizabeth Jane Howard, E Nesbit, Fay Weldon, Edith Wharton and Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
From diggers and weeders, to artists and colourists, writers and dreamers to trend-setters, plantswomen to landscape designers, women have contributed to the world of gardening and gardens. Here Deborah Kellaway, author of The Making of an English Country Garden and Favourite Flowers , has collected extracts from the 18th century to the present day, to create a book that is replete with anecdotes and good-humoured advice. Colette, Margery Fish, Germaine Greer, Eleanor Sinclair Rohde, Vita Sackville-West, Rosemary Verey, Edith Wharton and Dorothy Wordsworth are some of the writers represented in this book.
Some of us adore it, some of us live for it, some of us loathe it - but we all do it. SHOP. This is a book to celebrate the passion and the fear.
A glittering seasonal collection of stories, poems, diaries, and letters written by more than 50 women authors, among them Nancy Mitford, Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, Colette, George Sand, and Elizabeth von Arnim.
'Frost in May is the unsurpassed novel of convent school life. This story of a clash between a determined young girl and an authoritarian regime is both perceptive and painfully emotional, convincing in every detail' - Hermione Lee, Observer With a new introduction by Tessa Hadley Nanda Gray, the daughter of a Catholic convert, is nine when she is sent to the Convent of Five Wounds. Quick-witted, resilient and eager to please, she accepts this closed world where, with all the enthusiasm of the outsider, her desires and passions become only those the school permits. Her only deviation from total obedience is the passionate friendships she makes. Convent life is perfectly captured - the smell ...
'The moment I got my job at Virago in 1978 I knew it would be a long time before I would leave. I certainly wouldn't have had the brazen hope then-only twenty-five and very recently new to Britain-that I would ever become the Publisher, but I did know that I had found my home: where books, ideas, politics, imagination, feminism, and business was the air we breathed . . .' A Bite of the Apple is part-memoir, part history of Virago, and part thoughts on over forty years of feminist publishing. This is the story of how the authors and staff who, driven by passion, conviction and excitement, have made Virago Press one of the most important and influential English-language publishers in the world...
For centuries women have written about love with passion, humour, frustration and despair; but never before have their voices come together as in this exhilarating and timeless compendium. Here are love poems in all their true, subversive drama, delicately arranged according to a balance of moods and modes: of argument and lyric, joke and passionate utterance, rejection, rage and ecstacy. Poets, well-known and obscure, ancient and modern - from Sappho to Akhamotova,Patti Smith to Selima Hill, Sylvia Plath to Alice Walker - all challenge the traditional perception of women as muse and object of desire, and magnificently transcend it.