Katherine Mansfield The child Kezia Burnell stands in for the writer Katherine Mansfield in her family stories “Prelude” and “At the Bay...

Rosa Burger, the main character of Nadine Gordimer’s book Burger’s Daughter (1979) is first seen at age 14 outside the prison where her mot...

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...