Book of Awesome Women Writers. Becca Anderson

      DOROTHY WORDSWORTH “wild lights in her eyes”

      Beloved poet William Wordsworth was one of his sister’s biggest admirers and she his “dearest friend” during his life. She was the only girl of the five children born to the Dorsetshire family. When their mother passed away in 1778, when Dorothy was seven, relatives raised her away from her four brothers.

      But despite being raised apart, William and Dorothy were extremely close. William, two years older than his sister, inherited some money of his own when he turned twenty-six and bought an English country cottage just for the two of them. William’s destiny as a poet was already unfolding. Dorothy, to aid her brother and amuse him, began to keep a series of journals that not only reveal the lives of important literary figures but also have a purity and merit all their own. The portraits of their daily existence alone are priceless, but her machinations to inspire and “preserve” her brother as a poet are also remarkable. Today scholars pore over the journals for their wealth of information about the poet.

      When William met and married Mary Hutchinson, at first Dorothy felt betrayed and abandoned. Eventually, her loyalty and love won out, and she pitched in to care for his children, for whom she wrote her own poetry, including “Peaceful Is Our Valley.” The valley in which they lived, rhapsodized over by brother William, was peaceful indeed, an idyllic place visited often by friends William Hazlitt, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Coleridge, and Robinson. De Quincey penned reminiscences about his visits to the cottage, where he was shocked by what he perceived as Dorothy stepping outside a proper feminine role: “The exclusive character of her reading, and the utter want of pretension, and of all that looks like bluestockingisms.”

      Later writers, including Virginia Woolf, puzzled over her life. Was she stifled by the towering talent of her brother and held back by her gender? A closer look at her diaries and the beautifully sculpted entries there reveal one thing certainly: she was a happy person and one with nature and her own nature. While her brother sometimes labored over his works, under pressure to produce for the eyes of the world, she was free to allow her impressions to flow freely. However, not all was to remain rosy forever; she spent the last twenty-five years of her life struggling with both physical and mental illness.

      The Sea perfectly calm blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and tongues or points of sand, on our return a gloomy red. The sun goes down. The crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus.

      Dorothy Wordsworth

      NALO HOPKINSON fabulous fabulist of Caribbean culture

      Nalo Hopkinson, born in Jamaica in 1960, is a Canadian speculative fiction author and editor who has also been a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside since 2011; her teaching focuses on the fantasy, science fiction, and magic realism genres, and she is a member of a faculty research cluster in science fiction. Her writing draws on myth and folklore as well as Caribbean language, history, and storytelling traditions.

      Her family moved around quite a bit; as a child, besides Jamaica and Canada, Nalo also lived in Trinidad, Guyana, and the United States. Her mother worked in libraries, and her father was a playwright, actor, and poet from Guyana who also taught both Latin and English. Literacy came early for her, despite learning disabilities that were only diagnosed when she was an adult; by age three, she could read, and at ten, she was reading Kurt Vonnegut and Homer’s Iliad. From the beginning, she preferred fantastical fiction, including “everything from Caribbean folklore to Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction and fantasy.” Nalo had a firsthand experience of culture shock when her family moved from Guyana to Toronto, Canada, when she was sixteen, and she has stated she is “still not fully reconciled” to that shift. She lived in Toronto before attending Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania, where she earned an MA in the writing of popular fiction.

      After working in various civil service positions dealing with the arts and in libraries, Hopkinson began to write speculative fiction in her early thirties; by the time she participated in the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop at Michigan State University in 1995, she had already sold a couple of short stories. Two years later, her magical realism and folklore-inflected novel Brown Girl in the Ring won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest; the prize included publication of the work by Warner Aspect. Her debut opus also won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her 2003 work Skin Folk garnered a World Fantasy Award and a Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and 2004’s Salt Road won a Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive exploration of queer issues in speculative fiction. Her novel The New Moon’s Arms drew both the Prix Aurora Award of Canada and a Sunburst Award, making Hopkinson the first author ever to receive the latter prize twice.

      Despite this success, Hopkinson endured major financial difficulties when serious illness struck and she was unable to work for a lengthy period. She suffers from fibromyalgia and went through periods of acute anemia brought on by fibroids as well as serious vitamin D deficiency; due to these health challenges, she was unable to write or publish for a period of six years. She was even without housing of her own for a couple of years before beginning to teach at the University of California.

      Hopkinson has written nine novels and about a dozen published short stories, as well as House of Whispers (2018), a graphic novel set in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman universe that draws on Caribbean mythic, magical, and spiritual traditions. She has also edited a number of anthologies, including Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000); Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003); and So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (2004). Besides folklore and Caribbean traditions, she incorporates feminist awareness and historical consciousness in her writing, often focusing on social issues and race, class, and sexuality. She draws inspiration from eclectic sources such as songs; her 2013 novel Sister Mine was inspired by Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market.

      Professor Hopkinson says of herself that she loves “bopping around in the surf” and enjoys sewing, fabric design, and crafting objects in various media; she dreams of “one day living in a converted church, fire station, or library…or in a superadobe monolithic dome home.”

      JAMES TIPTREE, JR. the writer who came in from the cold

      James Tiptree, Jr. was the main nom de plume of award-winning science fiction author Alice “Alli” Sheldon (1915–1987), née Bradley, who also wrote under a half-dozen other names. She was born in the Hyde Park district of Chicago to a lawyer/naturalist father and a prolific author mother. At age six, Alice ventured abroad to the Belgian Congo with her parents and naturalist Carl Akeley, a family friend. She visited Africa twice more as a child, in 1924–1925 (as part of a trip around the world) and in 1931. Mary Hastings Bradley, her mother, wrote books about their first two journeys, two of which Alice illustrated, the children’s books Alice in Jungleland and Alice in Elephantland.

      At nineteen, Alice eloped with a Princeton student she had met days earlier, William Davey, which ended her studies at Sarah Lawrence. She tried her hand at painting, but it didn’t work out; in 1941, she divorced Davey and returned to Chicago, working at the Chicago Sun as their art critic. The next year, she joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and later the Air Force, attaining the rank of major and working at the Pentagon as an aerial reconnaissance photograph interpreter. When World War II ended, she was transferred to a different unit; she ended up marrying her commanding officer, Colonel Huntington Sheldon. In 1946, the couple left the military, running a New Jersey chicken farm from 1948 to 1952. They were then asked to work for the CIA; she analyzed political shifts in Africa and continued her work with photographic intelligence, while he was director of current intelligence.

      But Alice was not happy working at the CIA, and in 1955, she quit; she was having doubts about her marriage, so employing her intelligence skills, she “disappeared” for a time and went back to college, remaining apart from her husband for a year, although the reunited couple’s marriage then continued