Virginia’s Sisters (An Anthology of Women’s Writings) complied by Gabi Reigh

A fascinating anthology of poetry and prose by leading feminist writers of the 20th century on the topic of women’s freedom and the idea of the ‘New Woman’. This international collection offers over 20 literary gems by favourite and newly rediscovered women writers.

Selected and introduced by Gabi  Reigh who gives context to the selected contributions from women writers who were expressing their hopes for freedom and autonomy during the early part of the twentieth century.

Review

This is an eclectic group of writings by women living in the first half of the 20th century. There is a mixture of writers that many will have heard of i.e. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf but some have only been published in English for the first time. It's a collection of prose and poems along with quotes and drawings. There is a list of the authors with mini-bios and also information about the translators. I wish that this had been included by the actual piece of writing as it would have allowed the reader to gain some context about the writer.

I thoroughly enjoyed this anthology and it flowed extremely well. The inclusion of poetry and quotes allowed me to differentiate the short stories. Sometimes, I find they blend into one another for me but not in this case. I was most excited about reading the pieces from authors throughout the world and finding new authors to me. What I found about all these pieces is that the reflection's points are all still very relatable to this day and age. We might be a hundred years later than some of these were written but the questions and the feelings evoked were relevant to today’s world.

I particularly like ‘Unheard’ by Yenta Serdatsky as who hasn't been in that position once in their lives and I really resonated with it. I have read a few of the other well-known authors but I also loved ‘Villa Myosotis’ by Sorana Gurian. It had a haunting quality of isolation and loneliness which I found quite hard to read.

Overall, this is a brilliant anthology and I loved reading every piece in the collection. Let me know if you pick this one up!