Women Write the Night
Description
Night has long been perceived as Man-Land – a place for men to adventure, misbehave and experience extreme creativity. Darkness does not hold space for women… or so we’ve been told.
In Women Write the Night, Annabel Abbs reveals that women have always lived a rich and vital life after the sun goes down. From Enheduanna (2286 BCE), the world’s first writer, to the eighteenth-century astronomer, Caroline Herschel, night has long empowered women with space to work, allowing both insight and inspiration. For others, the quiet and stillness offers moments of calm and clarity, much-needed respite from their daily labours. But the night is not just a serene cerebral space, Abbs also shares enticing tales of the pleasures of all-night parties, dancing the night away and the thrill of seeking new intimacies.
With writing from remarkable women, Hildegard von Bingen and Aysheh Samarqandi in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through to Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Audre Lourde, as well as original pieces from contemporary writers, Noreen Masud, Jini Reddy, Dipika Mukherjee, Emily Chappell, Isis Dove-Edwin, Clare Pooley and Emily Midorikawa, Women Write the Night illustrates that far from sleeping soundly in their own beds, for millennia women have been wide awake at night – working, walking, studying, creating, star-gazing – embracing their complex and nuanced nocturnal selves.