'Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature'
Biographers in Conversation interview with Anna Beer
On Thursday, Dr Anna Beer, the author of five acclaimed biographies and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College in Oxford, will chat with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature in a Biographers in Conversation interview.
Eve Bites Back includes biographical sketches and reappraisals of eight talented female authors who lived, wrote and published between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Jane Austen and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
Fascinatingly, these authors are still in print today. Among them are novelists, autobiographers, travel writers, playwrights, poets, journalists and diarists. Warned not to write—and certainly not to bite—these women put pen to paper anyway and wrote themselves into history.
Finding the Story, The Red Thread
By highlighting the difficulty women have always faced in writing and publishing their work, Anna offers an alternative to some of the more traditional ways of understanding where the books we read come from, who writes them and what survives. Anna explores the ways these eight gamechangers, groundbreakers and genre-makers challenged stereotypes and created memorable stories and characters as they fought to be heard in a world dominated by men.