Modern Heroines is a selection of short stories written between 1900 and 1915 by the celebrated Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942), well known for the saga of novels starring the unforgettable Anne of Green Gables. The 17 short stories that make up this anthology were selected from hundreds of stories by Montgomery that were published in magazines of the time and then left behind. The compilation includes stories of heroines that largely respond to the ideals of the new woman of the early 20th century. In Montgomery's entertaining and subtle fashion, these delightful stories bring us closer to what it was like to be a woman more than a hundred years ago. We feel the expectations of marriageable young women, but also the uncertainties of those who, not having a husband before thirty, were considered "old spinsters." The concerns of women who wished to occupy a different role in life from that of wife and mother are also reflected. The difficulty of those who had no fortune and were compelled to ensure their livelihood is evident as well as the obligation of always having to comply with men's desires and needs, or with what was imposed by a society that pigeonholed women and did not offer them options outside the domestic sphere. Most of the modern heroines depicted in this book reflect the feelings of many women who, at the dawn of the twentieth century, were no longer willing to conform and obey, women who demanded to be masters of their own lives.

What if your biggest challenge, deepest vulnerability, or worst fear was only leading you to more of your own inner light? In this special collection of female experiences, meet 24 real women - who feel like new friends - as they openly and courageously share with you their private struggles and unexpected life developments. From divorce, friendships ending, questioning her life direction, and life-threatening health challenges, to losing her mom, becoming a mom, moving through inner pain, spiritual growth, and many more topics, every story is shared openly and from her heart. As each woman reemerges on the other side of a hardship and dark period, she offers you greater wisdom, forgiveness, strength, and trust to support you in your own life. Be prepared for greater healing and peace as you emotionally connect with each woman who hopes to inspire you through life's challenges and unexpected turns. She reminds you that no matter what may be unfolding, every journey is ultimately an invitation to know more of your soul and self, while fully embracing yourself as a modern heroine.

Heroines from literature come to life and visit Anne-Marie's bed and breakfast, where she tries not to interfere with their lives in fear it will change the outcome of their novels.

"Thorndike Press Striving Reader Collection."

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long-buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman. The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women’s work—spinning, mending, and weaving—is carried out. Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, Campbell’s archetypical hero has dominated more than the box office. In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their “mischief making” evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard’s wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a “hero’s journey,” but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care. “By turns dazzling and chilling” (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.

A manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a generation of writers and scholars, reissued after more than a decade. I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature. On the last day of December 2009, Kate Zambreno, then an unpublished writer, began a blog called "Frances Farmer Is My Sister," arising from her obsession with literary modernism and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her partner held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy portraits of the fates of the modernist “wives and mistresses," reclaiming the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community of writers and devised a new feminist discourse of writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon. In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it—she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the “minor,” and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. “ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological,” writes Zambreno. “When he does, it's existential.” With Heroines, Zambreno provided a model for a newly subjectivized criticism, prefiguring many group biographies and forms of autotheory and hybrid memoirs that were to come in the years to follow. A book that has become its own canon, Heroines was named one of the "50 Books that define the past 5 Years in Literature" by Flavorwire, an "Essential Feminist Manifesto" by Dazed, and one of the "50 Greatest Books by Women" in Buzzfeed.

Parallel narratives alternating between Joan of Arc in 15th-century France and a 21st-century West Point cadet.