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Adult Fiction & Nonfiction for Women's History Month |
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A masterful debut novel following a spirited young woman's explorations of faith, agency, and love in thirteenth-century Bruges. Aleys is sixteen years old and unusual: stubborn, bright, and prone to religious visions. She and her only friend, Finn, a young scholar, have been learning Latin together in secret--but just as she thinks their connection might become something more, everything unravels. When her father promises her in marriage to a merchant she doesn't love, she runs away from home, finding shelter among the beguines, a fiercely independent community of religious women who refuse to answer to the Church.
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Child of These Tears by Molly McNettIn the early years of the eighteenth century, the settlers living in the hamlet of Hartfield Falls in English America face the looming threat posed by historical and political forces beyond their control. Queen Anne's War has brought the French and their Native American allies into deadly proximity to New England's colonists. On one fateful day in the depth of winter, young Constance Baker is taken captive in a bloody raid on Hartfield Falls and marched north to Canada -- a march she barely survives. Soon her destiny becomes bound up in a struggle between her English parents, the Mohawk tribe into which she has been adopted, and a French Jesuit priest, who reluctantly takes on her spiritual direction.
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Huguette by Cara BlackAugust 1945. Seventeen-year-old Huguette Faure is a survivor. The war has taken everything from her--both her parents and her sense of safety. Now, pregnant and on the lam, she cannot return to her childhood home in Paris. Forced to reinvent herself, she must outrun her father's enemies, who want her dead. After narrowly avoiding jail time--thanks to the help of a kind-hearted police officer named Claude Leduc--Huguette lands a job assisting a legendary film director. As her role develops from helping him with chores to cooking his books, she sees an opportunity to break free from the ghosts of her past once and for all.
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The Wax Child by Olga RavnIn seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man and gives them dark powers: they can steal people's happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or even death. They are all in danger of the stake. The Wax Child, narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, is an unsettling horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of premodern Europe.
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Mrs. Endicott's Splendid Adventure by Rhys BowenSurrey, England, 1938. After thirty devoted years of marriage, Ellie Endicott is blindsided by her husband's appeal for divorce. It's Ellie's opportunity for change too. The unfaithful cad can have the house. She's taking the Bentley. Ellie, her housekeeper Mavis, and her elderly friend Dora--each needing escape--impulsively head for parts unknown in the South of France.
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Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution by Amanda VaillAmerica's founding era reconsidered through the lives of two women as formidable as, and in some respects stronger than, the men they loved, married, and mothered. If it hadn't been for the Revolutionary War, things might have been very different for the two women Alexander Hamilton came to describe as his dear brunettes. Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, daughters of colonial Hudson Valley aristocracy, would have followed their family's expectations, making dynastic marriages and supervising substantial households--but they didn't. Instead, they became embroiled in the turmoil of America's insurrection against Great Britain, and rebelled themselves, in ways as different as each sister was from the other, against the destiny mapped out for them.
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Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance, and Slavery in the Caribbean by Miranda KaufmannFrom Jamaica to Charleston, Sierra Leone to India, Australia and back to England, this is the story of the heiresses--and the role they played in the history of enslavement. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was a fact universally acknowledged that any man in want of a great fortune ought to find himself a Caribbean heiress. Their assets, the product of the exploitation of enslaved African men, women, and children, enabled them to marry into the top tiers of the aristocracy and influence society and politics. They fell in love (not always with their husbands), eloped, divorced, squandered fortunes, commissioned art, threw parties, went mad and (in once case) faked a daughter's death.
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Barbieland: The Unauthorized History by Tarpley HittThe secret history of Barbie and what Mattel has done to keep her on top. For nearly seven decades, Mattel billed Barbie as the first adult doll--a revolutionary alternative to the baby dolls before her, which had treated little girls as future mothers rather than future women. But Barbie was no original. She was a knockoff: a nearly identical copy of a German doll now erased from the narrative in favor of Mattel's preferred version of history. It was Barbie's first secret but far from her last. In Barbieland, journalist Tarpley Hitt exposes the long-hidden backstory of the world's most famous doll.
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Queens at Warby Alison WeirAlison Weir chronicles the five queens who got caught up in wars that changed the courses of their lives: the Hundred Years' War between England and France, and the Wars of the Roses between the royal Houses of Lancaster and York. Against this tempestuous backdrop, Weir describes the lives of five Plantagenet queens, who occupied the consort's throne from 1403 to 1485.
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