Amy Shearn

These 19th-century novelists might seem to have little in common. But for 11 years they wrote each other letters, forging an unusual literary friendship.

He's hailed as the "father of infection control" and the "savior of mothers," but the truth about Ignaz Semmelweis is more complicated than that.

At Hesdin, in France, the idyllic beauty of the grounds met the sadistic slapstick of the castle’s “engines of amusement.”

Debut novelist Jessie Chaffee on how she researched her critically-acclaimed new novel Florence in Ecstasy, with a little help from JSTOR.

The august Irish poet was once a member of a secret occult order called The Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn. He was also an avid student of the Tarot.

Perhaps the Harry Potter stories are so potent because they rework the iconic hero stories of medieval French Arthurian romances.

An interview with Arif Anwar, whose debut novel covers sixty years of Bengali history in five love stories.

Clare Boothe Luce was a socialite, an editor, a feminist playwright, a devout Roman Catholic, a Republican Congresswoman, an early LSD user, an ambassador, and, believe it or not, more.

Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" is a cultural touchstone. But what about the women behind the "Women," Alcott's real-life sisters on whom she based her characters? An interview with novelist Elise Hooper considers the life of "The Other Alcott."

Remembering history helps us to parse the present, and it follows that women struggling to process these "decades of pent-up anger" can find apt reading material in the feminist fiction of the 1970s.