the great library · a shelf
The woman's voice through history
The first author in history whose name we know was a woman, a priestess at Ur about 4,300 years ago. This shelf walks forward from her in time, in two halves. The first is her own words: poems, visions, letters and novels that women wrote. The second is her voice as men wrote it, from Diotima teaching Socrates about love to Mary Magdalene standing up to Peter. We keep the two apart, and where nobody is sure who wrote a text, we say so.
Her own words
Her voice in the texts
Shamhat and the wild manIshtar's proposalShiduri at the edge of the seaThe Song of SongsThe poles of AsherahDemeter's searchMedeaLysistrataThe BacchaeDiotima's teaching on loveBefore the queen of the deadSimaetha's love spellCassandra's prophecyAnthia at the festivalThe Acts of Paul and TheclaThe Protoevangelium of JamesDialogues of the CourtesansMary Magdalene's questionsWe will not endure this womanŚakuntalā
Her own words
Texts written by women. Some survived because a man quoted them, or because they were bound into a man's book, and many more were lost.
A prayer to Aphrodite
from Sappho's Fragments
about 600 BC · Lesbos
The one poem of Sappho that survives whole. She calls the goddess down from heaven to help her win a woman who won't love her back, and Aphrodite comes, smiling. Most of her nine books are lost. This poem lived because a teacher in Rome quoted it.
read it now
At last, love has come
from Sulpicia's Six Elegies
1st century BC · Rome
The only poems by a Roman woman to reach us from the age of Augustus. A young woman of a great family announces her love affair and refuses to be ashamed of it. Her six poems survived because they were copied into a book of a man's poems.
read it nowENIN-ME-ŠARA
The Exaltation of Inanna
Enheduanna
about 2300 BC · Ur, in Sumer
Daughter of King Sargon and high priestess of the moon god at Ur. In her hymn to the goddess Inanna she tells how a rebel drove her out of the temple, and how she made the song in the night. The first author in history we know by name.
read the openingPPride & Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
1813 · England
Jane Austen's name was not on it. The title page said only: by the author of Sense and Sensibility. Read here in her English, glossed into Portuguese.
read the opening
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
1818 · Geneva and London
Mary Shelley began it at eighteen, in a ghost-story contest on a stormy summer by Lake Geneva. The first edition carried no author's name. Read here in her English, glossed into Portuguese.
read the openingHHeidi
Heidi
Johanna Spyri
1880 · Switzerland
Johanna Spyri's orphan, sent up a mountain to live with her grandfather. Spyri wrote in German. This is the English translation, glossed into Portuguese.
read the openingAAnne of Green Gables
Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery
1908 · Prince Edward Island
Lucy Maud Montgomery's orphan arrives at a farm that asked for a boy, and talks her way into staying. Read here in her English, glossed into Portuguese.
read the opening源源氏物語
The Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu
about 1000–1010 · the court at Kyoto
A lady-in-waiting wrote what is often called the first novel. Her real name is lost. Murasaki is a nickname taken from her own heroine.
in the press · help press itJJULIAN
Revelations of Divine Love
Julian of Norwich
1373 and after · Norwich
A woman who lived walled into a cell beside a church wrote down the visions she had when she was close to death. Hers is the first book in English we know was written by a woman. All shall be well.
in the press · help press itCLA CITÉ DES DAMES
The Book of the City of Ladies
Christine de Pizan
1405 · Paris
Widowed at twenty-five with a family to keep, Christine wrote for a living. Tired of books that slandered women, she answered them by building a city out of women's lives.
in the press · help press itJRESPUESTA
The Answer to Sor Filotea
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
1691 · Mexico City
A nun in New Spain, famous for her poems and her library. When a bishop told her to give up secular study, she wrote back in defence of a woman's right to learn. Within a few years she had stopped writing.
in the press · help press itHer voice in the texts
Women as men wrote them: goddesses, priestesses, prophets, lovers and saints. These are men's books, but some of the strongest voices in them belong to women. Where she speaks only in one part of a longer book, the card opens the book at her page.
Shamhat and the wild man
from Gilgamesh, Tablet I
c. 1200–1000 BC · Babylonia
Shamhat, a woman of Ishtar's temple, is sent to meet Enkidu at the watering place, where he lives with the gazelles. After a week with her he can no longer run with the herd. She talks him into coming to the city, and he becomes a man.
read it nowIshtar's proposal
from Gilgamesh, Tablet VI
c. 1200–1000 BC · Babylonia
The goddess of love asks Gilgamesh to marry her and offers him a chariot of gold and lapis lazuli. He turns her down and names every lover she has ruined. Her fury brings down the Bull of Heaven.
read it nowShiduri at the edge of the sea
from Gilgamesh, Tablet X
c. 1200–1000 BC · Babylonia
An ale-wife keeps a tavern at the end of the world. She bars her door against a wild-looking stranger, hears out his grief, and tells him how to reach the Waters of Death. An older version of the poem gives her a famous speech on enjoying the life you have, which this later version leaves out.
read it nowייְשַׁעְיָהוּ
The poles of Asherah
from Isaiah 17 and 27
8th century BC and after · Judah
Twice Isaiah promises a day when the people will stop looking to the asherim, the wooden poles of the goddess Asherah. She never speaks. These verses are part of how she was written out.
read it now
Demeter's search
from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
7th–6th century BC · Greece
A mother hears her daughter scream and runs over land and sea to find her. For nine days she carries torches and won't eat or wash. Her grief stops the grain from growing until the gods give Persephone back.
read it now
Diotima's teaching on love
from Plato's Symposium
about 385–370 BC · Athens
At a party where each man makes a speech about love, Socrates says that all he knows about it he learned from a woman, Diotima of Mantinea. She leads him up a ladder from one beautiful body to beauty itself. Whether she was a real woman is still argued.
read it now
Before the queen of the dead
from the Orphic Gold Tablets
4th century BC · Thurii, southern Italy
A gold leaf buried with a dead woman. She speaks to Persephone, queen of the underworld: I come pure from the pure. Several of these leaves were made for women, and the last one in the book names its owner, Caecilia Secundina.
read it nowΦΦΑΡΜΑΚΕΥΤΡΙΑΙ
Simaetha's love spell
from Theocritus, Idyll 2
3rd century BC
At night, under the moon, a young woman works a spell to bring back the man who left her. Then she tells the moon how she fell for him, from the first look. A man wrote it, and every word of it is hers.
read it now
Cassandra's prophecy
from Lycophron's Alexandra
3rd–2nd century BC
Locked away by her father, the Trojan princess Cassandra pours out what is coming: the fall of Troy and the ships that will sink on the way home. Apollo cursed her so that no one would believe her. The whole poem is her speech, as her guard reports it to the king.
read it now
Anthia at the festival
from An Ephesian Tale
2nd century AD · Ephesus
Fourteen-year-old Anthia leads the girls in the procession of Artemis, dressed as a huntress, and the crowd takes her for the goddess. Shipwreck, pirates and kidnappers follow, and she keeps faith through all of it.
read it now
The Acts of Paul and Thecla
a heroine of the early church
2nd century AD · Iconium
A young woman listens to Paul from her window for three days and nights and decides not to marry. Her defiance made her one of the most loved saints of the early church. Only its first pages are in the reader so far.
read it now
The Protoevangelium of James
the Birth of Mary
2nd century AD
Mary's story before the Gospels begin: her parents, her birth, her girlhood in the Temple. The first chapter is open so far, where her father is shamed for having no child.
read it now
Mary Magdalene's questions
from Pistis Sophia
3rd–4th century AD · Egypt
After the resurrection Jesus teaches his disciples, and Mary Magdalene asks more than anyone. He calls her blessed beyond all women on earth.
read it nowWe will not endure this woman
from Pistis Sophia
3rd–4th century AD · Egypt
Peter complains that Mary talks too much and leaves the men no turn. Later she tells Jesus she is afraid of Peter, because he hates our sex. Jesus answers that anyone filled with the spirit may come forward and speak.
read it nowΜΜΗΔΕΙΑ
Medea
Euripides
431 BC · Athens
Medea saved Jason and left her country for him, and he leaves her for a princess. Her speech on a woman's life is one of the hardest in Greek drama: she would rather stand in the battle line three times than give birth once.
read the openingששיר השירים
The Song of Songs
attributed to Solomon
first millennium BC · Israel
Love poems, most of them spoken by a woman: I am black and beautiful. The book is credited to Solomon, but the strongest voice in it is hers.
in the press · help press itΛΛΥΣΙΣΤΡΑΤΗ
Lysistrata
Aristophanes
411 BC · Athens
The women of Greece refuse their husbands until the men end the war. A comedy by a man, with a woman running the show.
in the press · help press itΒΒΑΚΧΑΙ
The Bacchae
Euripides
405 BC · Thebes
The women of Thebes leave their looms for the mountains to worship a new god. The king who spies on them pays for it.
in the press · help press itΛΛΟΥΚΙΑΝΟΣ
Dialogues of the Courtesans
Lucian
2nd century AD · the Greek East
Fifteen short scenes in which courtesans talk among themselves about money, mothers and men. Lucian wrote them, and the talk is all theirs.
in the press · help press itशकालिदास
Śakuntalā
Kālidāsa
4th–5th century AD · India
A king falls in love with a young woman in a forest hermitage, and a curse wipes her from his memory. Kalidasa named the play for her, and its heart is the scene where she stands before the king who has forgotten her.
in the press · help press itWho wrote what
Enheduanna. Her hymns survive in copies made by scribes about five hundred years after her lifetime. Many scholars take them as hers. Others think later scribes wrote or reworked them in her name. We give her the name the tablets give her, and we say this on her page.
Sulpicia. Six short elegies in the third book of poems that has come down under Tibullus' name, 3.13 to 3.18, are generally taken as hers, and those are the six in our reader. Five more poems about her love affair, 3.8 to 3.12, may be by her, or by a poet writing about her, and scholars are divided on which.
Diotima. She appears only in Plato, and nothing outside his dialogue shows that she lived.
Coming to this shelf
The letters of the Pythagorean women, Theano, Perictione, Phintys and Myia, whose authorship is argued over. Hypatia, none of whose books survive, read through the letters of her student Synesius and the account of her murder in 415. Then Perpetua's prison diary, Egeria's travels, Héloïse's letters, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite Porete, who was burned with her book in 1310, Thunder, Perfect Mind, and the sayings of Rabia al-Adawiyya, most of them written down long after her.
The goddesses have their own run of books too: see love and gender through the millennia and the Homeric Hymns.
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