To Read & To Write

We know that women have influenced and created sums of what we understand as mankind. We know this in our hearts and minds. But do we recognize it? Do we give heed and homage to the importance of their paths, their footprints? Maria Mitchell, Emily Dickinson, Rachel Carson. Virginia Woolf. Margaret Fuller, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Peabody. Harriet Hosmer. Louisa May Alcott. Those are just over a handful of the women whose minds and biographies Maria Popova traverses with her pen, writing a very different kind of history, without any neglect to men. But in "Figuring", it is these women whose femininity, addressed and articulated in countless unfathomable ways, who are brought to the fore. Their figures are mapped by Popova in a text-book *like* style that is anything but simply chronological. Popova is brilliant in contextualizing moments in the personal lives of each subject (who also include men such as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph...