299 Women Who Shaped World History

Born: October 12, 1904, Anfu [now Linli],Hunan province, ChinaDied: March 4, 1986, Beijing Ding Ling was the assumed name of Chiang Wei-Chih, Chinese novelist, whose works include Wei Hu (1930) and The Sun Shines over the Sangkan River (1948).She was imprisoned by the Kuomintang (Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists) in the 1930s. She was wrongly labelled as […]

Born: April 17, 1885, Rungsted, DenmarkDied: September 7, 1962, Rungsted Isak Dinesen, pseudonym of Baroness Karen Christence Blixen-Finecke, née Dinesen was a Danish writer, born in Rungsted. She studied painting in various European cities. In 1914 she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, and went to live in British East Africa (now Kenya) on a

Born: Dec. 10, 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.Died: May 15, 1886, Amherst Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was, with Walt Whitman, one of the two foremost American poets of the 19th century. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, of an old Connecticut River valley family. Her grandfather, her father, Edward, and her older brother Austin served as the

Born: November 12, 1651, San Miguel Nepantla, Viceroyalty of New Spain [now in Mexico]Died: April 17, 1695, Mexico City Juana Ines was a poet, dramatist, scholar and nun, an outstanding writer of the Latin-American colonial period and of the Hispanic Baroque.Juana Ramírez had thirst for knowledge from her earliest years and throughout her life. As

Born: Jan 28, 1873, Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, FranceDied: Aug 3, 1954, Paris Colette, pen name of Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette French novelist, who probed deeply into the life of the senses and into human, particularly physical, relationships.Colette was born in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in the province of Burgundy. In 1893 she married the first of her three husbands, the

Born: June 5, 1937, Oran, Algeria Héléne Cixous is a French feminist critic and theorist, novelist and playwright. Cixous’s first language was German. She was reared in Algeria, which was then a French colony, a circumstance that, by her own account, gave her the undying desire to fight the violations of the human spirit wrought

Born: Sep 3, 1938, London, EnglandCaryl Churchill is a British playwright, whose political perspective and experimentation with theatrical forms made her one of the most important contemporary female playwrights in Britain. Churchill’s writing focuses on issues of class and economics and their effect on women. She was born in London and lived in Montréal, Canada,

Born: 1364, Venice [Italy]Died: c. 1430 Christine de Pisan was a French poeters, prose writer, and humanist, born in Venice, Italy. Her childhood was spent at the court of the French king Charles V, and she later wrote his biography. After ten years of marriage to the court secretary, Étienne du Castel, she became a

Born: May 20, 1900, Havana, CubaDied: September 19, 1991, Miami, Florida, U.S. Lydia Cabrera was a Cuban ethnologist and short-story writer noted for both her collections of Afro-Cuban folklore and her works of fiction. She is considered a major figure in Cuban letters.The daughter of Cuban historian Raimundo Cabrera, Lydia Cabrera was told African folk

Born: c. 1612, Northampton, Northamptonshire, EnglandDied: September 16, 1672, Andover,Massachusetts Bay Colony [U.S.]Anne Bradstreet was a American poet, born in Northampton, England. She was a daughter of Thomas Dudley, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and in 1628 she married Simon Bradstreet, who later became governor of the colony. A housewife with eight children, she

Born: July 14, 1868, Washington Hall, Durham, EnglandDied: July 12, 1926, Baghdad, Iraq Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was a British archaeologist, writer and government official, born in Durham County, England, and educated at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. From 1899 to 1914, she made several archaeological expeditions in Asia Minor and on the Arabian

Born: Jan 9, 1908, Paris, FranceDied: April 14, 1986, Paris Simone de Beauvoir was a French novelist, playwright, autobiographer and essayist. One of the most important writers of her generation, she became known as an influential feminist theorist and a key exponent of existentialism, a movement in philosophy that emphasizes individual freedom and choice. Her

Born: June 24, 1937, Mussoorie, India Anita Desai is Indian novelist who is known for her studies of Indian life. Desai’s characters strive to achieve their goals in a complicated and unsympathetic world; one of her recurring themes is the struggle of women to assert their independence in a restrictive Indian society.Desai was born Anita

Born: Dec 16, 1775, Steventon, Hampshire, EnglandDied: July 18, 1817, Winchester, Hampshire Jane Austen was a major English novelist, whose brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satirical fiction marks the transition in English literature from the 18th-century neo-classicism to the 19th-century romanticism.Austen was born near Basingstoke, in the parish of Steventon, of which her father was rector.

Born: June 11 [June 23, New Style], 1889, Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine, Russian EmpireDied: March 5, 1966, Domodedovo, near Moscow,Russia, U.S.S.R. Anna Akhmatova, pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, Russian lyric poet, is considered one of the greatest poets in the history of Russian literature. With Osip Mandelstam she was a leader of the early