A Life of One's Own

JOANNA BIGGS is an editor at Harper's Magazine. Previously an associate editor at the London Review of Books, she is one of the founders of Silver Press, a London-based feminist publishing house. She has also written for the New Yorker, the FT and the Guardian, as well as appearing on BBC Radio 4 and events in London, Berlin and New York. Her first book, All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, was published in 2015, and was one of the Observer's books of the year.

“To make sense of and find a shape to one’s life within the context of one’s literary predecessors is the project of Biggs’s brilliant book, which combines incisive biographies with a personal story of starting over. This book reframed my own life in the most startling and revealing ways, illuminating complicated desires and lifelong debates via the absorbing stories of nine women authors who I now consider sisters, teachers, kin. A deeply moving meditation on reading and writing, friendship, desire, the life of the mind, and the woman writer’s perennial yearning to be free.” — Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
"A meditation, by turns glorious and aching, on what it means to be a woman and to try to be free.” — Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex
"Joanna Biggs is an unmissable writer. She gives new scope and fresh meaning to the idea of literary empathy." — Andrew O'Hagan, author of Mayflies
“Joanna Biggs is one of our sharpest critics and wisest interrogators of how to live. This is a deeply moving and invigorating book.” — Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting