Geraldine Brooks Anna Frith is 20 when plague comes to the village of Eyam, Derbyshire, England, in 1665. She is the main witness to what be...

James McBride and Ruth MacBride Jordan Ruth Jordan was born in Poland in 1921. Two years after her birth, her father, a Jewish rabbi, moved ...

Gish Jen Hattie Kong is born in Shandong province, China, her father a distant descendant of the Confucius family. Her mother is a Christian...

Jamaica Kincaid At 19, Lucy is sent by her mother to the United States from her native place, the island of Antigua in the Caribbean. She is...

Mary Hallock Foote Born on a farm in upstate New York, Susan Burling Ward, the protagonist of Angle of Repose [1971] by Wallace Stegner, wa...

Marianne Wiggins We meet Sunny, blonde hair flying, in a red cape, herding goats in the Owens Valley in California, 1941. She comes into the...

Helena Bonham Carter 1985 Lucy, the heroine of E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View [1908], grows up at Windy Corner in the Surrey hills in so...