A Life of One’s Own

A few years into her marriage and under pressure to surrender to domesticity, Joanna Biggs found herself longing for a different kind of existence. The relationship was calm and her husband was a good man, but was this all there was? She divorced without knowing what would come next. Newly untethered, Joanna returned to the free-spirited writers of her youth and was soon reading in a fever – desperately searching for evidence of lives that looked more like her own, for the messiness and freedom, for a possible blueprint for intellectual fulfilment. In ‘A Life of One’s Own,’ Sylvia Plath, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Toni Morrison, Simone de Beauvoir, Zora Neale Hurston and Elena Ferrante are all taken down from their pedestals, their work and lives held up to the light. Joanna wanted to learn more about the conditions these women needed to write their best work.