Joanna Biggs, formerly an editor at the LRB, is deputy editor of the Yale Review. A Life of One’s Own was published in 2023.
Eileen is 24, all ribs, shoulders and hips with ‘lemon-sized’ breasts and nipples ‘like thorns’. She still has acne scars across her cheeks. She wears thick tights and skirts that pass her knees and buttons everything else up to the neck. Eileen reads National Geographic and lives with her father, an ex-cop and a drunk who is at least ‘easy to distract and...
Are Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels even books? I began to doubt it when I talked about them with other people – mostly women. We returned to life too quickly as we spoke: who was your Lila, the childhood friend who effortlessly dazzled everyone? Or – a question not happily answered – were you Lila? S. said she had got back in touch with an estranged friend to give her the first volume in the series; K. felt that, impossibly, embarrassingly even, the books captured how she’d gone about finding an intellectual identity for herself.
Behind a branch of a fast-food chain in Lincoln, there is a featureless yellow brick call centre open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day. From the level of noise as the call centre handlers walk in, they can often guess what’s happening across the country. Bad weather causes a surge in the number of calls: a dense, chattering sound. A terrorist attack is loud. But less...
PJ Harvey recorded her eighth album, Let England Shake (2011), in a church on a Dorset clifftop with ‘a graveyard which has trees bent by the wind’. On Saturday, she finished sessions for her ninth album in the basement of Somerset House on the banks of the Thames, whose water had cracked the institutional white paint and seeped mouldily into the carpet. She worked on the songs for a month in a purpose-built white studio with one-way windows, letting the public eavesdrop on her (there were four 45-minute visiting sessions each day; tickets sold out fast). I went on the last day.
Instead of the new season fantasy every woman is instructed to have as autumn approaches, this September I dreamed of throwing all my clothes out. Things that I used to turn to – a purple boiled wool cocoon dress, a swishy black midi skirt, a sheer silk blouse with a print of parrots and parasols – disappointed me. My clothes, I noticed, were mostly the colours of a bruise as...
Marguerite Yourcenar entered the Académie Française in 1981, the first woman to be admitted. Her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, published thirty years earlier, is ‘often considered the best French novel...
Toril Moi talks to Joanna Biggs about the French philosopher Simone Weil, whose short and uncompromising life became a workshop for her revolutionary ideas about labour, human suffering and the power...
Jenny Turner talks to Joanna Biggs about the history of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the loneliness of feminist work, and the seemingly unavoidable question: How do you think your life compares to...
Joanna Biggs talks to Thomas Jones about the life of Simone de Beauvoir.
Susan Pedersen talks to Joanna Biggs about Shelagh Delaney and her landmark 1958 play, A Taste of Honey.
Nell Dunn and Tessa Hadley talk to Joanna Biggs about fictional representations of women’s everyday lives, as part of our 40th anniversary event series.
Mark and Seamus are joined by Joanna Biggs, an editor at the LRB, to look at Sylvia Plath's life and poetry.
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