#2751
Joanna Baillie
1762 - 1851 (89 years)
Joanna Baillie was a Scottish poet and dramatist, known for such works as Plays on the Passions and Fugitive Verses She was critically acclaimed in her lifetime, and while living in Hampstead, associated with contemporary writers such as Anna Barbauld, Lucy Aikin, and Walter Scott. She died at the age of 88.
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Nancy Cunard
1896 - 1965 (69 years)
Nancy Clara Cunard was a British writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class, and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon—who were among her lovers—as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian socialist leader V. K. Krishna Menon.
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Stevie Smith
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith , was an English poet and novelist. She won the Cholmondeley Award and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. A play, Stevie by Hugh Whitemore, based on her life, was adapted into a film starring Glenda Jackson.
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Miles Franklin
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin , known as Miles Franklin, was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, published by Blackwoods of Edinburgh in 1901. While she wrote throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936.
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Isabel Briggs Myers
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Isabel Briggs Myers was an American writer who co-created the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. The MBTI is one of the most-often used personality tests worldwide; over two million people complete the questionnaire each year.
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Vicki Baum
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Hedwig "Vicki" Baum was an Austrian writer. She is known for the novel Menschen im Hotel , one of her first international successes. It was made into a 1932 film and a 1989 Broadway musical. Education and personal life Baum was born in Vienna into a Jewish family. Her mother Mathilde suffered from mental illness, and died of breast cancer when Vicki was still a child. Her father, described as "a tyrannical, hypochondriac" man, was a bank clerk who was killed in 1942 in Novi Sad by soldiers of the Hungarian occupation. She began her artistic career as a musician playing the harp. She studied at the Vienna Conservatory and played in the Vienna Concert Society.
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Vera Brittain
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Vera Mary Brittain was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, writer, feminist, socialist and pacifist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.
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Edna Ferber
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big , Show Boat , Cimarron , Giant and Ice Palace , which also received a film adaptation in 1960. She helped adapt her short story "Old Man Minick", published in 1922, into a play and it was thrice adapted to film, in 1925 as the silent film Welcome Home, in 1932 as The Expert, and in 1939 as No Place to Go.
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Christine de Pizan
1363 - 1430 (67 years)
Christine de Pizan or Pisan , was an Italian-born French poet and court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French dukes. Christine de Pizan served as a court writer in medieval France after the death of her husband. Christine's patrons included dukes Louis I of Orleans, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and his son John the Fearless. Considered to be some of the earliest feminist writings, her work includes novels, poetry, and biography, and she also penned literary, historical, philosophical, political, and religious reviews and analyses. Her best known works are The Book of the City...
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Lin Huiyin
1904 - 1955 (51 years)
Lin Huiyin was a Chinese architect and writer. She is known to be the first female architect in modern China and her husband is the famed "Father of Modern Chinese Architecture" Liang Sicheng, both of whom worked as founders and faculty in the newly formed Architecture Department of Northeastern University in 1928 and, after 1949, as professors in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Liang and Lin began restoration work on cultural heritage sites of China in the post-imperial Republican Era of China, a passion which she would pursue to the end of her life. The American artist Maya Lin is her niec...
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Ouida
1839 - 1908 (69 years)
Maria Louise Ramé , going by the name Marie Louise de la Ramée and known by the pseudonym Ouida , was an English novelist. During her career, Ouida wrote more than 40 novels, as well as short stories, children's books and essays. Moderately successful, she lived a life of luxury, entertaining many of the literary figures of the day.
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Táhirih
1817 - 1852 (35 years)
Táhirih As a young girl she was educated privately by her father and showed herself a talented writer. Whilst in her teens she married the son of her uncle, with whom she had a difficult marriage. In the early 1840s she became a follower of Shaykh Ahmad and began a secret correspondence with his successor Kazim Rashti. Táhirih travelled to the Shiʻi holy city of Karbala to meet Kazim Rashti, but he died a number of days before her arrival. In 1844 aged about 27, in search of the Qa'im through the Islamic teachings she figured his whereabouts. Independent to any individual she became acquainted with the teachings of the Báb and accepted his religious claims as Qa'im.
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Radclyffe Hall
1880 - 1943 (63 years)
Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and author, best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature. In adulthood, Hall often went by the name John, rather than Marguerite.
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Charlotte Mary Yonge
1823 - 1901 (78 years)
Charlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist, who wrote in the service of the church. Her abundant books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement and show her keen interest in matters of public health and sanitation.
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Anna Pavlova
1881 - 1931 (50 years)
Anna Pavlovna Pavlova was a Russian prima ballerina of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. She was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. Pavlova is most recognized for her creation of the role of The Dying Swan and, with her own company, became the first ballerina to tour around the world, including performances in South America, India, Mexico and Australia.
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Gabrielle Roy
1909 - 1983 (74 years)
Gabrielle Roy was a Canadian author from St. Boniface, Manitoba and one of the major figures in French Canadian literature. Early life Roy was born in 1909 in Saint-Boniface , Manitoba, and was educated at the Académie Saint-Joseph. She was born into a family of eleven children and reportedly began to write at an early age. She lived on rue Deschambault, a house and neighbourhood in Saint-Boniface that would later inspire one of her most famous works. The house is now a National Historic Site and museum in Winnipeg.
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Kate L. Turabian
1893 - 1987 (94 years)
Kate Ledgerwood Turabian was an Armenian-American educator who is best known for her book A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. In 2018, the University of Chicago Press published the 9th edition of the book. The University of Chicago Press estimates that the various editions of this book have sold more than 9 million copies since its publication in 1937. A 2016 analysis of over one million college course syllabi found that Turabian was the most commonly assigned female author due to this book.
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Lillian Hellman
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Lillian Florence Hellman was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist sympathies and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–1952. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a drop in her income. Many praised Hellman for refusing to answer questions by HUAC, but others believed, despite her denial, that she had belon...
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Pamela Hansford Johnson
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow, was an English novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic. Life Johnson was born in London. Her mother, Amy Clotilda Howson, was a singer and actress, from a theatrical family. Her mother's father, C E Howson, worked for the London Lyceum Company, as Sir Henry Irving's Treasurer. Her father, Reginald Kenneth Johnson, was a colonial civil servant who spent much of his life working in Nigeria. Her father died when she was 11 years old, leaving debts. Her mother earned a living as a typist. Until Pamela was 22, the family lived at 53 Battersea...
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Ellen Glasgow
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was an American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942 for her novel In This Our Life. She published 20 novels, as well as short stories, to critical acclaim. A lifelong Virginian, Glasgow portrayed the changing world of the contemporary South in a realistic manner, differing from the idealistic escapism that characterized Southern literature after Reconstruction.
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Adelaide Crapsey
1878 - 1914 (36 years)
Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Rochester, New York. Her parents were the businesswoman Adelaide T. Crapsey and the Episcopal priest Algernon Sidney Crapsey, who moved from New York City to Rochester.
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Alice Dalgliesh
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Alice Dalgliesh was a naturalized American writer and publisher who wrote more than 40 fiction and non-fiction books, mainly for children. She has been called "a pioneer in the field of children's historical fiction". Three of her books were runners-up for the annual Newbery Medal, the partly autobiographical The Silver Pencil, The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, and The Courage of Sarah Noble, which was also named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list.
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Marian Engel
1933 - 1985 (52 years)
Marian Ruth Engel was a Canadian novelist and a founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada. Her most famous and controversial novel was Bear , a tale of erotic love between an archivist and a bear.
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Mary Lascelles
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Mary Madge Lascelles was a British literary scholar, specialising in Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and Walter Scott. She was vice-principal of Somerville College, Oxford, from 1947 to 1960, and a university lecturer then reader in English literature 1960 from to 1967 at the University of Oxford.
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Edith Birkhead
1889 - 1951 (62 years)
Edith Birkhead was a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol and a Noble Fellow at the University of Liverpool. She wrote a pioneering work on Gothic literature: The Tale of Terror . This work described the fascination with supernatural fiction in English literature from the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1764 to Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820 on to modern times. She included works from Europe as well as America, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.
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Lida Shaw King
1868 - 1932 (64 years)
Lida Shaw King was an American classical scholar and college dean. Biography Lida Shaw King was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were Henry Melville King and Susan Ellen Fogg King. She graduated from Vassar College in 1890 and from Brown University in 1894 and continued her graduate studies at Vassar , Radcliffe , Bryn Mawr , and at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens where she was awarded the Agnes Hoppin Memorial Fellowship. She taught the classics at Vassar and at the Packer Collegiate Institute , and at Brown was assistant professor of classical philology , dea...
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Blanche Colton Williams
1879 - 1944 (65 years)
Blanche Colton Williams was an American author, editor, department head and professor of English literature, and pioneer in women’s higher education. She was known for her “groundbreaking work on structure and analysis of the short story” and is credited with having done more for the short story genre than anyone in her lifetime. An 1898 graduate of Industrial Institute and College in Columbus, Mississippi, the first public women’s university in the United States, Williams went on to a three-decade career at Hunter College, a women’s college in New York City.
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Wilmer Cave Wright
1868 - 1951 (83 years)
Emily Wilmer Cave Wright was a British-born American classical philologist, and a contributor to the culture and history of medicine. She was a professor at Bryn Mawr College, where she taught Greek. Wright's works include, The Emperor Julian’s relation to the new sophistic and neo-Platonism , A Short History of Greek Literature, from Homer to Julian , Julian , Philostratus and Eunapius: The Lives of the Sophists , Against the Galilaeans , Hieronymi Fracastorii de contagione et contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione libri III , and De morbis artificum Bernardini Ramazini diatriba . Giovanni Ma...
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Leigh Brackett
1915 - 1978 (63 years)
Leigh Douglass Brackett was an American science fiction writer known as "the Queen of Space Opera." She was also a screenwriter, known for The Big Sleep , Rio Bravo , and The Long Goodbye . She worked on an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back , elements of which remained in the film; she died before it went into production. In 1956, her book The Long Tomorrow made her the first woman ever shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and, along with C. L. Moore, one of the first two women ever nominated for a Hugo Award. In 2020, she posthumously won a Retro Hugo for her novel The Nemesis...
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Thea von Harbou
1888 - 1954 (66 years)
Thea Gabriele von Harbou was a German screenwriter, novelist, film director, and actress. She is remembered as the screenwriter of the science fiction film classic Metropolis and for the 1925 novel on which it was based. von Harbou collaborated as a screenwriter with film director Fritz Lang, her husband, during the period of transition from silent to sound films.
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Alla Nazimova
1879 - 1945 (66 years)
Alla Nazimova was a Russian-American actress, director, producer and screenwriter. On Broadway, she was noted for her work in the classic plays of Ibsen, Chekhov and Turgenev. She later moved on to film, where she served many production roles, both writing and directing films under pseudonyms. Her film Salome is regarded as a cultural landmark.
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Josefina Passadori
1900 - 1987 (87 years)
Josefina Passadori was an Italian-Argentine academic, educator, and writer. She published several textbooks as well as poetry under the pen name Fröken Thelma. Biography Passadori was born in Mezzanino, Pavia, Italy. In 1922, she graduated from La Unidad Académica Escuela Normal Superior N° 1 Mary O. Graham in La Plata, where she taught for almost forty years .
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Eliza Haywood
1693 - 1756 (63 years)
Eliza Haywood , born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. An increase in interest and recognition of Haywood's literary works began in the 1980s. Described as "prolific even by the standards of a prolific age", Haywood wrote and published over 70 works in her lifetime, including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood today is studied primarily as one of the 18th-century founders of the novel in English.
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Helen Gray Cone
1859 - 1934 (75 years)
Helen Gray Cone was a poet and professor of English literature. She spent her entire career at Hunter College in New York City. Early life and education Cone was born in New York and attended the Normal College of the City of New York, later renamed Hunter College. She graduated in 1876 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and became an instructor in the Normal College English department. In the 1880s she served as president of the Associate Alumnae of the Normal College.
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Josefina Niggli
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Josefina Niggli was a Mexican-born Anglo-American playwright and novelist. Writing about Mexican-American issues in the middle years of the century, before the rise of the Chicano movement, she was the first and, for a time, the only Mexican American writing in English on Mexican themes; her egalitarian views of gender, race and ethnicity were progressive for their time and helped lay the groundwork for such later Chicana feminists as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. Niggli is now recognized as "a literary voice from the middle ground between Mexican and Anglo heritage." Cri...
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Eva Le Gallienne
1899 - 1991 (92 years)
Eva Le Gallienne was a British-born American stage actress, producer, director, translator, and author. A Broadway star by age 21, Le Gallienne gave up her Broadway appearances to devote herself to founding the Civic Repertory Theatre, in which she was director, producer, and lead actress. Noted for her boldness and idealism, she became a pioneering figure in the American repertory movement, which enabled today's off-Broadway. A versatile and eloquent actress herself , Le Gallienne also became a respected stage director, coach, producer and manager.
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Ann Stanford
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Ann Stanford was an American poet. Early life and education Ann Stanford was born in La Habra, California and attended Stanford University where she graduated in 1938 Phi Beta Kappa, and University of California, Los Angeles, with an M.A. in journalism in 1958, an M.A. in English in 1961, and a Ph.D. in English and American literature in 1962.
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Caroline Ransom Williams
1872 - 1952 (80 years)
Caroline Ransom Williams was an Egyptologist and classical archaeologist. She was the first American woman to be professionally trained as an Egyptologist. She worked extensively with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other major institutions with Egyptian collections, and published Studies in ancient furniture , The Tomb of Perneb , and The Decoration of the Tomb of Perneb: The Technique and the Color Conventions , among others. During the Epigraphic Survey of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute's first season in Luxor, she helped to develop the "Chicago House method" ...
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Julia Irvine
1848 - 1930 (82 years)
Julia Josephine Thomas Irvine was the fourth president of Wellesley College, serving from 1894 to 1899. Irvine was the daughter of Indiana suffragist Mary M. Thomas. A Cornell University graduate, she came to Wellesley College as a professor of Greek in 1890. During her tenure as Wellesley president, she enacted a number of reforms and eliminated some of the rules for students such as silent time, domestic work, the prohibition on Sunday library hours and mandatory Chapel attendance. She replaced several professors, especially those without advanced degrees, as part of an overhaul of academic...
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Viola S. Wendt
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Viola Sophia Wendt was an American poet and educator. Early life and education Wendt was born into a farming family in Boise, Idaho, in March 1907, the first of two daughters of Carl Wendt. Her parents moved to West Bend, Wisconsin in 1914 in order for her father to pursue new business opportunities. Viola was educated there, graduating from West Bend High School in 1924. She was a bright student, especially excelling at languages, writing, and literary analysis. Accordingly, Wendt entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison , majoring in English Literature. During her time there as an und...
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Sophie Jewett
1861 - 1909 (48 years)
Sophie Jewett , also known under the pseudonym Ellen Burroughs, was an American lyric poet, translator, and professor at Wellesley College. Much of her poetry contains lesbian themes. Family Jewett was born in Moravia, New York, one of four children of Charles Carroll Jewett, a doctor, and Ellen Ransom Jewett. Her mother died when she was 7 and her father when she was 9, after which she was raised by an uncle, Daniel Burroughs, and her grandmother in Buffalo. Her sister Louise became a noted art historian. In Buffalo, she developed a friendship with Mary Whiton Calkins, the daughter of her mi...
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Frances Garnet Wolseley, 2nd Viscountess Wolseley
1872 - 1936 (64 years)
Frances Garnet Wolseley, 2nd Viscountess Wolseley was an English gardening author and instructor. Her Glynde College for Lady Gardeners in East Sussex had the patronage of famous gardening names such as Gertrude Jekyll, Ellen Willmott, and William Robinson.
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Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė
1886 - 1958 (72 years)
Sofija Čiurlionienė née Kymantaitė was a Lithuanian writer, educator, and activist. After studies at girls' gymnasiums in Saint Petersburg and Riga, she studied philosophy, literature, art history at the and Jagiellonian University. She returned to Lithuania in 1907 and joined the cultural life of Vilnius. In January 1909, she married painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, but he died in April 1911 leaving her with an infant daughter. Until the start of World War I, she taught Lithuanian language and literature at teachers' courses established by the Saulė Society in Kaunas. She lectured at the Vytautas Magnus University from 1925 to her retirement in 1938.
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Zola Helen Ross
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Zola Helen Ross was a Pacific Northwest writer. She also taught writing and co-founded the Pacific Northwest Writers Association with Lucile Saunders McDonald of The Seattle Times. She wrote in various genres, including adventure, children's fiction, crime, mystery, and suspense. She was also the author of several Western historical novels; her male counterpart was Louis L'Amour. The Pacific Northwest and the Great Basin are the settings for her stories, and they include the towns of Reno, San Francisco, and Seattle. Ross occasionally wrote under the pseudonyms Helen Arre and Bert Iles. She ...
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Varvara Adrianova-Peretz
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Professor Varvara Pavlovna Adrianova-Peretz was a Soviet and Russian philologist and medievalist specializing in Old Russian literature, folklore, and hagiography. She was a corresponding member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union .
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Maria Timpanaro Cardini
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Maria Timpanaro Cardini , born Maria Cardini, was an Italian philologist who studied the history of ancient philosophy and history of science. Biography Cardini was born in Arezzo on August 24, 1890. She received her degree in Greek philology in Naples in 1914. She traveled briefly to Berlin to study with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Hermann Diels. Cardini was active for several years as a dadaist poet. She was friends with, among others, Tristan Tzara, but abandoned poetic practice in 1920.
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Mary Vivian Hughes
1866 - 1956 (90 years)
Mary Vivian Hughes , usually known as Molly Hughes and published under M. V. Hughes, was a British educator and author. Life The daughter of a London stockbroker, she was born Mary Thomas and passed most of her childhood in Canonbury, under the watchful eyes of four older brothers. Her father, a modestly successful stockbroker, was discovered dead on a train line in 1879. His death remains a mystery. She attended the North London Collegiate School and the Cambridge Training College for Women, and was later awarded her BA in London.
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Anwara Bahar Chowdhury
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Anwara Bahar Chowdhury was a Bangladeshi social activist and writer. Background and education Chowdhury was admitted to Sakhawat Memorial Girls' High School, established by women rights activist Begum Rokeya. She passed matriculation in 1934. She completed her higher secondary school examination and BA degree from Bethune College of Kolkata. She passed Bachelor in Teaching from Scottish Church College in 1941.
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Elizabeth Williams Champney
1850 - 1922 (72 years)
Elizabeth Williams Champney was an American author of novels and juvenile literature, as well as travel writing, most of which featured foreign locations. Champney's observations and experiences during her European travels were published in Harper's Magazine, and also in The Century Magazine. She published eighty or more articles in Harper's and Century, including a series on Portugal, and papers entitled "A Neglected Corner of Europe", and "In the Footsteps of Futuney and Regnault". After her return to the United States, Champney wrote fifteen books; novels, stories for juveniles, and historical works under cover of stories, mostly adapted to young people.
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Mary Bigelow Ingham
1832 - 1923 (91 years)
Mary Bigelow Ingham was an American author, educator, and religious worker. Dedicated to teaching, missionary work, and temperance reform, she served as professor of French and belles-lettres in the Ohio Wesleyan College; presided over and addressed the first public meeting ever held in Cleveland conducted exclusively by religious women; co-founded the Western Reserve School of Design ; and was a charter member of the order of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
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