Women Writers from Around the World Quiz

Answer: Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn has an important place in European literary history, as one of the first women to earn her living through her writing. Her early years are obscure, although she is known to have been employed as a spy in around 1666, and later began to write as a way of paying off debts.

Her literary reputation has fluctuated over the succeeding centuries, but writers and historians all agree that she paved the way for all subsequent women who sought to make writing their career, rather than a hobby. The painting is by the famous artist Peter Lely and is dated 1670, near the start of her career.

The incorrect options are three mistresses of King Charles II.

Answer: The Scarlet Pimpernel

Emma Orczy was born in Tarnaors, Hungary, in 1865, the daughter of Baron Félix Orczy de Orci. Her family moved to England in 1880, and in 1894 she married an artist who she had met at a London art school. She began writing to supplement his meagre income, and achieved fame when a play she and her husband had written played for four years on the London stage.

Set at the time of the French Revolution, the play (entitled "The Scarlet Pimpernel") recounted the exploits of the Englishman Sir Percy Blakeney, whose mission was to save French aristocrats from the guillotine. In some ways he was a predecessor of such "superheroes" as Bruce Wayne (Batman) and Tony Stark (Iron Man), posing by day as a foppish playboy, while hiding the secret identity (the Scarlet Pimpernel) under which he carried out his heroic exploits.

Emma Orczy's novelization of the play was equally successfully, and she went on to write many more books about the eponymous hero, along with other novels of romance and adventure. After a long and happy life, she died in 1947 at the age of 82 in Henley-on-Thames, England.

Answer: Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was sold into slavery aged around seven, and was bought by a Boston businessman named John Wheatley. She was given the name Phillis after the slave ship in which she was transported to America. She was given an unusually good education by the Wheatley family, who helped to get her poetry published.

Her writing was acclaimed at the time, although not everyone believed that a slave could have produced poetry of such a high quality. She remained in the service of the Wheatleys until 1778, when she was granted her freedom. Ironically, her subsequent life was marked by a descent into poverty and illness, and she died in 1784, aged around 31.

Answer: Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. She became a prominent member of the "Bloomsbury Group" of artists and writers which flourished in the area of London around the British Museum from around 1905 until the Second World War. It is arguable that her most significant work is the essay "A Room of One's Own", in which she discusses various issues around women and their writing. Sadly, she suffered from mental illness throughout her life, and drowned herself in 1941 in the River Ouse near her house in Sussex.

Answer: Nobel Prize in Literature

Grazia Deledda was born on 27 September 1871, on the Italian island of Sardinia. Her first novel, "Nell'azurro" ("Into the Blue"), was published in 1890, and from then on she became a prolific writer of novels and plays. Her best work was concerned with the lives and struggles of the Sardinian peasantry, and the citation for her Nobel Prize stated that it was awarded "for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general".

She died of cancer on 15 August 1936.

Answer: Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova was already a well-known poet when her life was transformed by the Russian Revolution of 1917. She decided not to follow many of her friends into exile, but found her work criticised for "bourgeois" attitudes. During the twenties and thirties she wrote mostly in secret, during which time many of her family and friends were murdered or imprisoned. Following Stalin's death in 1953 she slowly began to publish again. Even so, "Requiem" was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987, 21 years after her death in 1966.

The picture shows a portrait of her painted in 1922 by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Finally, you may have spotted that the incorrect options are all female Russian composers.

Answer: George Sand

George Sand was born in Paris in 1804. Her novels include such works as "La Mere au Diable" (1846), "Lucrezia Floriani" (1847), which contains a character based closely on Chopin, and "Indiana" (1832). Even during her lifetime, she was probably better known for such scandalous behaviour as dressing in men's clothing and smoking in public, not to mention indulging in numerous affairs.

The picture shows a photograph of her taken in 1864, when she was aged 60.

Answer: Anne

The three Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne) between them produced seven novels and a volume of poetry during their relatively short lives. This picture was sketched by Charlotte, the eldest of the three sisters, and shows Anne aged 14, in 1834. Anne was born in 1820 and published two novels, "Agnes Grey" (1847) and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (1848).

She died of tuberculosis in 1849 at the age of 29, and is buried in the churchyard of St Mary's church, Scarborough, Yorkshire.

Answer: Willa Cather

Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873. She began her writing career with poetry and short stories, publishing her first collection of stories, "The Troll Garden", in 1905. The novels of her Prairie Trilogy were much praised for their depictions of life in Nebraska farming communities, and her female characters are often notable for their strength of mind and independence.

In 1922 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel "One of Ours", which is partly set in France during the First World War.

She died in New York in 1947, aged 73.

Answer: Dr Winston O'Boogie

Dr Winston O'Boogie was a pen-name sometimes used by the musician John Lennon.

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (to give her full name) was born in Talbingo, New South Wales, in 1879. Her first novel, "My Brilliant Career" was published in 1901, and remained much her most popular and acclaimed work of fiction. Perhaps weighed down by the pressure of trying to live up to its promise, she subsequently published a series of six novels about life in the Australian bush under the pseudonym "Brent of Bin Bin". She wrote newspaper articles under a number of names, including "An Old Bachelor". Another pen-name, Ogniblat L-Artsau, is (almost) Austral Talbingo backwards, after her birthplace.

She had always been supportive of other Australian writers, and after her death in 1954 she bequeathed money to set up a literary award, for the 'advancement, improvement and betterment of Australian Literature'. The "Miles Franklin Award" has been given annually since 1957.