10 Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About These Famous Women Authors

10 Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About These Famous Women Authors

The International Women’s Day celebration is here once again. Indeed, the world has been impacted by a lot of women, and the literary world is no exception. Here’s some quick facts about famous women authors you probably didn’t know about:

 

#1. George Eliot was actually a woman, named Mary Ann Evans. She wrote under this pen name because women authors were not as highly regarded as men in her era.

#2. When British author, Doris Lessing was at the peak of her career, she sent two new novels under a pen name, Jane Somers, to her publisher. The works were rejected. Doris Lessing had wanted to illustrate just how difficult it is for a new writer to get published.

#3. Second Class Citizen‘s author, Buchi Emecheta was sixteen years old when she got married to her husband.

#4. Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women under three months!

#5. Nigerian author, Chimamanda Adichie studied medicine before crossing to Pharmacy. Eventually, she left medical school to pursue writing.

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#6. American author, Toni Morrison started writing in her mid-thirties.

#7. English author, Zadie Smith took almost two years to write the first twenty pages of On Beauty.

#8. Akwaeke Emezi identifies as a non-binary transgender author, a fact unknown to the judges before their story, Freshwater, was nominated for the Women’s prize for fiction.

#9. Maya Angelou was San Francisco’s first-ever black female streetcar conductor.

#10. Malala Yousafzai started blogging for the BBC at the age of eleven, under the pseudonym Gul Makai, about life under the Taliban rule in Pakistan.