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Anne Boyd Rioux

Goodreads Author

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http://anneboydrioux.com/

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AnneBoydRioux

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Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir

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June 2013

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https://www.goodreads.com/abrioux

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Anne Boyd Rioux is passionate about the recovery off 19th-century women writers, many of whom have been unjustly forgotten. She is the author of MEG, JO, BETH, AMY: THE STORY OF LITTLE WOMEN AND WHY ITS STILL MATTERS (Aug. 2018, Norton), CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON: PORTRAIT OF A LADY NOVELIST, and editor of MISS GRIEF AND OTHER STORIES, (both Norton, 2016). She is a professor and writes books, reviews, and essays for general and academic audiences.

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What are you currently working on?

Anne Boyd Rioux I'm writing a book about Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women. It will be published in 2018 to celebrate the novel's 150th anniversary. (It was firs…moreI'm writing a book about Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women. It will be published in 2018 to celebrate the novel's 150th anniversary. (It was first published in 1868.) What I'm writing is a kind of biography of the book: how it came to be, how it was first received, the cultural phenomenon it became, and how it is read today. It will combine biography, cultural history, literary criticism, and memoir. I'm having a blast writing it!(less)

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Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Anne Boyd Rioux I found Constance Fenimore Woolson by accident really. I was browsing the library stacks when I was in graduate school and saw a book with my name on …moreI found Constance Fenimore Woolson by accident really. I was browsing the library stacks when I was in graduate school and saw a book with my name on it: ANNE. That was the title of her first novel. So it caught my eye, but it was a recently published collection of her stories nearby–Women Artists, Women Exiles–that really got me interested. I was looking for women writers who had written about what it was like to be a serious artist in the 19th century, and she turned out to be the real deal–someone who wrote about serious women artists and was one herself. The more I read, the more I was drawn to the tensions between ambition and renunciation that were at the heart of her portraits of women.
I ended up writing about her in my dissertation, which became my first book: Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America. She was one of four writers I focused on and she always stuck with me as the most ambitious and successful of the group. Then I took a break from scholarship for a bit when my daughter was young, but I found my way back to Woolson when the scholarly group, the Constance Fenimore Woolson Society, asked me to return to their biennial conference. This wonderful group of devoted scholars pulled me back in, and I am grateful for that. I soon discovered, though, that the work they had done bringing Woolson’s work back into print and getting her into the college anthologies was stalling. There weren’t as many new scholars to take the place of the ones who were retiring (because of budget cuts in academia and the slow rate of new hiring). The collection of stories I had loved went out of print, and then Woolson was removed from one of the main anthologies. So I knew we had to do more to make sure she didn’t disappear again.
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Anne Boyd Rioux’s books

Average rating: 4.02 · 4,259 ratings · 837 reviews · 11 distinct works • Similar authors

	Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Anne Boyd Rioux (Goodreads Author) (Editor, Introduction), Patti Smith (Goodreads Author) (Foreword) 4.17 avg rating — 2,440,904 ratings — published 1868 — 5974 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters 3.85 avg rating — 2,262 ratings — published 2018 — 13 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Miss Grief and Other Stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson, Colm Tóibín (Foreword), Anne Boyd Rioux (Goodreads Author) (Editor) 4.15 avg rating — 130 ratings — published 2016 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist 4.19 avg rating — 104 ratings — published 2016 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Collected Stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson, Anne Boyd Rioux (Goodreads Author) (Editor) 4.35 avg rating — 17 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America by Anne Boyd Rioux (Goodreads Author), Anne E. Boyd 3.50 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 2004 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Secret Histories: A New Era in Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship by Kathleen Diffley (editor), Caroline Gebhard (editor), Cheryl Torsney (editor) it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Secret Histories: A New Era in Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship by Kathleen Diffley (editor), Caroline Gebhard (editor), Cheryl Torsney (editor) it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894 by Kathleen Diffley, Anne E. Boyd, Martin T. Buinicki (Contributor) it was ok 2.00 avg rating — 1 rating — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century by Anne Boyd Rioux (Goodreads Author), Anne E. Boyd (Editor) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2009 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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A Lost (But Incredibly Perceptive) Psychological Novel: The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott

The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story is a favorite so far among my students in the “Forgotten Books” class I’m teaching this semester. It is set in the South of France in the late 1920s but was written in 1940, long after its author, Glenway Wescott, had left France. My students and I all agreed that it is a beautiful, unjustly forgotten book. As Michael Cunningham says in the introduction, “It contains

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Vanessa and Virginia

by Susan Sellers (Goodreads Author)

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Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana

by Lawrence N. Powell (Goodreads Author)

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Possession

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Quotes by Anne Boyd Rioux (?)

“What seems like a tale from a simpler time turns out to be the product of a difficult and sometimes troubled life. What appears to be a sweet, light story of four girls growing up is also very much about how hard it was (and is) to come of age in a culture that prizes a woman’s appearance over her substance. And what may seem an idealized portrait of an intact home and family is also the story of a family in danger of being torn apart.”
― Anne Boyd Rioux, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters

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“The best stories, however, are living things, and as much as we may cherish the original, the true act of love comes in the retelling.”
― Anne Boyd Rioux

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“As girls gravitate to more contemporary fare and away from Little Women, they are missing a lot. Today’s successors to Little Women seem to have overlooked two of the most important themes of Alcott’s classic: companionate marriage and sisterhood. And many of them are missing the central premise altogether, namely that growing up means becoming a better person, one who can balance her own needs and desires with those of the people she loves.”
― Anne Boyd Rioux, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters

tags: women-writers

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