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Book Review: The Secret History There’s something intoxicating about watching beautiful people make terrible choices. Donna Tartt understands this impulse perfectly when writing The Secret History, a novel that seduces readers into complicity with its morally bankrupt characters while simultaneously horrifying us with their actions. Published in 1992, Tartt’s novel remains a masterpiece in storytelling…
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Picture this: It’s 1840, and in a Boston parlor, a woman with piercing eyes and an even sharper mind is holding everyone’s attention. She’s asking questions that make the refined ladies shift uncomfortably in their chairs. What if women could be more than wives and mothers? What if we stopped apologizing for our ambitions? What…
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Have you ever felt like you were slowly disappearing? Not dying, but fading—like someone was gradually turning down the volume on your existence until you could barely hear your own voice? Charlotte Perkins Gilman knew that feeling. In 1887, she was a young mother trapped in what everyone assured her was a perfect life: a…
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Have you ever written a love letter you knew you could never send? Poured your heart onto paper knowing that the very act of loving made you dangerous—not just to yourself, but to everyone around you? Angelina Weld Grimké lived her entire life writing those unsendable love letters. In an era when being Black meant…
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Have you ever written something that you knew would change everything? Something that felt both terrifying and necessary, like standing at the edge of a cliff with wings you weren’t sure would work? In 1773, a young Black woman named Phillis Wheatley found herself in this very place. She was about to become the first…
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I was seventeen when I first read The Great Gatsby and completely missed the point. Like most teenagers forced to analyze it for AP English, I was focused on the green light and the American Dream and wrote dutiful essays about symbolism. It wasn’t until years later, after rereading it as an adult woman, that…
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There is a reason women write ghost stories. And there’s a reason we return to them, again and again, not just to be frightened—but to feel seen. Because beneath every haunted house, every flicker of movement in a dark hallway, every sudden chill—there’s something older than fear. Something deeper. Something repressed. When I think about…
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Have you ever read a book by a woman writer and felt like she was speaking directly to your soul? Like she somehow knew the exact weight you carry, the precise shape of your unspoken thoughts? There’s something almost unsettling about how women’s literature can cut through centuries and still feel urgently and intimately relevant.…
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We shouldn’t have to wait until a woman writer is gone to take her seriously. There’s a quiet tragedy threaded through the history of women’s literature. So many of the voices we now praise were never fully heard in their own time. Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems—fewer than a dozen were published while she…
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There’s a scene in Sally Rooney’s Normal People where Marianne refreshed her Facebook feed obsessively, scrolling through images of her classmates living what appears to be perfect lives while she sits alone in her room, feeling more disconnected than ever. It’s a moment that perfectly captures our modern paradox. We’re more connected than any generation…
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Kat McAdaragh 