Unabridged Chick

This coffee table sized book provides a brief biography of 35 women writers, an excerpt from their work, and a soft color-pencil portrait. Organized in chronological order, the profiled authors range from the expected--Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, Toni Morrison--to the less well-known: Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, M.F.K. Fisher, and Edna O'Brien. There isn't much to say about this book: avid readers will be familiar with most of these authors, and the excerpts are too brief to provide more than a sense of the writing style. However, this book struck me as a lovely gift to younger readers, a catalog of 'greats', so to speak. Already, a second edition of this book has been released (with an amended subtitle numbering the authors at over forty) adding the list: Zora Neale Hurston, George Sand, Pearl S. Buck, Adrienne Rich, and Joyce Carol Oats, among others.