50 Classic Women Writers

by Ayn Rand, Mary Shelley, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Jane Austen

Overview

An anthology of 50 classic women writers with an active table of contents to make it easy to quickly find the book you are looking for.

Works include:

Adam Bede by George Eliot
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Anthem by Ayn Rand
Awakening and Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart
The Clever Woman of the Family by Charlotte Yonge
The Colors of Space by Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Convert by Elizabeth Robins
A Circuit Rider's Wife by Corra Harris
Cranford by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster
A Dog of Flanders by Louisa de la Rame
Each Man Kills by Victoria Glad
Emma McChesney & Co by Edna Ferber
The Fire Bird by Gene Stratton-Porter
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Heidi by Johanna Spyri
The House of Mirth By Edith Wharton
Hubert's Wife by Minnie Mary Lee
In the Mountains by Elizabeth von Arnim
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
The Indiscreet Letter by Eleanor Hallowell
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin
Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis
Love Affairs of an Old Maid by Lilian Bell
Man and Maid by Elinor Glyn
Miss Philly Firkin, The China-Woman by Mary Russell Mitford
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
Night and Day by Virginia Woolf
Phoebe, Junior by Margaret Oliphant
Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette
The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
A Simple Story by Mrs. Inchbald
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
Story of My Life by Helen Keller
What Not by Rose Macaulay
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012448804
Publisher:	Golgotha Press
Publication date:	05/21/2011
Series:	50 Classic Books , #39
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. At age six she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision that sustained her throughout her life. At the age of nine she decided to make fiction writing her career. Thoroughly opposed to the mysticism and collectivism of Russian culture, she thought of herself as a European writer, especially after encountering authors such as Walter Scott and—in 1918—Victor Hugo, the writer she most admired.

During her high school years, she was eyewitness to both the Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and—in 1917—the Bolshevik Revolution, which she denounced from the outset. In order to escape the fighting, her family went to the Crimea, where she finished high school. The final Communist victory brought the confiscation of her father's pharmacy and periods of near-starvation. When introduced to American history in her last year of high school, she immediately took America as her model of what a nation of free men could be.

When her family returned from the Crimea, she entered the University of Petrograd to study philosophy and history. Graduating in 1924, she experienced the disintegration of free inquiry and the takeover of the university by communist thugs. Amidst the increasingly gray life, her one great pleasure was Western films and plays. Long a movie fan, she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screen writing.

In late 1925 she obtained permission to leave Soviet Russia for a visit to relatives in the United States. Although she told Soviet authorities that her visit would be short, she was determined never to return to Russia. She arrived in New York City in February 1926. She spent the next six months with her relatives in Chicago, obtained an extension to her visa, and then left for Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter.

On Ayn Rand's second day in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille saw her standing at the gate of his studio, offered her a ride to the set of his movie The King of Kings, and gave her a job, first as an extra, then as a script reader. During the next week at the studio, she met an actor, Frank O'Connor, whom she married in 1929; they were married until his death fifty years later.

After struggling for several years at various non-writing jobs, including one in the wardrobe department at the RKO Corporation, she sold her first screenplay, Red Pawn to Universal Studios in 1932 and saw her first stage play, Night of January 16th, produced in Hollywood and then on Broadway. Her first novel, We the Living, was completed in 1933 but was rejected by publishers for years, until The Macmillan Company in the United States and Cassells and Company in England published the book in 1936. The most autobiographical of her novels—it was based on her years under Soviet tyranny—We the Living was not well-received by American intellectuals and reviewers. Ayn Rand was up against the pro-communism dominating the culture during "the Red Decade."

She began writing The Fountainhead in 1935. In the character of the architect Howard Roark, she presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man as "he could be and ought to be." The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers but finally accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. When published in 1943, it made history by becoming a best seller through word-of-mouth two years later, and gained for its author lasting recognition as a champion of individualism.

Ayn Rand returned to Hollywood in late 1943 to write the screenplay for The Fountainhead, but wartime restrictions delayed production until 1948. Working part time as a screenwriter for Hal Wallis Productions, she began her major novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1946. In 1951 she moved back to New York City and devoted herself full time to the completion of Atlas Shrugged.

Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was her greatest achievement and last work of fiction. In this novel she dramatized her unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics and sex. Although she considered herself primarily a fiction writer, she realized that in order to create heroic fictional characters, she had to identify the philosophic principles that make such individuals possible. She needed to formulate "a philosophy for living on earth."

Thereafter, Ayn Rand wrote and lectured on her philosophy—Objectivism. She published and edited her own periodicals from 1962 to 1976, her essays providing much of the material for nine books on Objectivism and its application to the culture. Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982, in her New York City apartment.

Every book by Ayn Rand published in her lifetime is still in print, and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year, so far totaling more than twenty million. Several new volumes have been published posthumously. Her vision of man and her philosophy for living on earth have changed the lives of thousands of readers and launched a philosophic movement with a growing impact on American culture.

Author biography courtesy of The Ayn Rand Institute.

Date of Birth:

February 2, 1905

Date of Death:

March 6, 1982

Place of Birth:

St. Petersburg, Russia

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

Graduated with highest honors in history from the University of Petrograd, 1924