Detail from Luncheon of the Boating Party Pierre-Auguste Renoir met his wife, Aline Charigot, in 1881 in Paris. She was 19, a dressmaker...

One of the great American heroines hardly anyone knows is Sayward Luckett. At fifteen Sayward walks with her family from Lancaster, Pennsylv...

Evgenia, Evgeni and Boris Pasternak Zhenia Luvers, the protagonist of The Childhood of Luvers , by Boris Pasternak (1918) grows up in a ...

For a few months in 1926, Andre Breton was mesmerized by a young woman whose perceptions were intense, but irrational. He met her on the str...

Sometimes “something came to the surface, inappropriately, unexpectedly, from the depths of people, and made ordinary actions, ordinary wo...

Komako is the main character in the book Snow Country , by Yasunari Kawabata, first published in 1947 and translated by Eward Seidensticker....

Abelone Brahe, a character in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge , by Rainer Maria Rilke, first published in 1910, is the youngest sister...