Please visit the second floor of the Newman Library to see a new display entitled “Portrait of the Woman as a Writer, 1870s-2020s.” Once again, members of our Access Services Division have curated a display that highlights books from the Newman Library collection. Read the curators’ note below and then come visit the Library!

We begin in a fictional world closely resembling our own, among the residents of the English town of Middlemarch in the year 1829. Despite the convention that women should write readers a happy ending, that is not what we get. By the time we’ve made it to the 2020s, in another fictional town called Vacca Vale, we’ve rounded the wheel of fortune many times, following Woman as she writes her story through 19th-century high society, the irrevocable social revolutions of the 1960s, and the dying cities of the contemporary United States. Explore these selections of writing by women authors, spanning the 1870s to the present day, and discover the connections that exist between time, place, and circumstance when a woman’s voice is telling the story. The selections can be found in Newman Library’s Engelman Reading Room and can be checked out at the Circulation Desk on the library’s second floor.