If you’re looking for a book about women writers in history, whose books are considered classics, then that’s the one for you! ‘Why She Wrote’ summarises the story of many female writers, mostly from the 1800-1900s, and their stories are also illustrated by Kaley Bales in a way that makes it a fun and lighthearted read.

It’s a good way to know more authors, since some aren’t as known mainstream as others, and to know more about the lives of those you already know. This book is just perfect for people who want to start reading classics and classical authors, but find them particularly difficult to understand or keep up with, or those who don’t have much time in their hands to do so. Basically, it’s the perfect way to become familiar with classics.

It is also a very interesting reading in a historical point of view, to analyze the context those texts were written and which struggles those writers had to go through socially to be able to speak their mind and live their life as they wished.

Basically, it’s a book that deals with heavy topics, as expected from any form of media about women who lived a century ago, especially some who were sapphics, women of color or in poverty, but the narrative of this book is as lighthearted as possible, considering the topics it portrays. It’s a great book you should certainly read if you’re interested in history and/or literature.

Have you ever stopped to wonder why some of the most famous authors out there were inspired to write? Well, the creative team behind Why She Wrote asked themselves that question, and here is their answer.

Why She Wrote: A Graphic History of the Lives, Inspiration, and Influence Behind the Pens of Classic Women Writers is an accurate description, and title, for this graphic novel. As this graphic novel tackles the stories of eighteen famous and beloved female authors.

This is a story that any interested reader should make a point of picking up. It allows for a quick glimpse into the lives and motivation of many authors we've known and loved for years. More importantly, it portrayed what some of them went through during the time they were making the decision to publish. It is something that adds almost a painful amount of context to their writing, in some instances.

It's also inspiring, in a way that I'm sure was intentional. And when not inspiring, it certainly is informative. I know that I learned a few things that my education or personal research never turned up. Gotta love it when that happens!

Why She Wrote is split into chapters, giving time to focus on each of the eighteen authors included. Each chapter includes a page (or more) of written history, details, and more about each author. Following that are the images that define this novel. They bring these true stories to life, in a way that is approachable for almost any age range.

It was so lovely to read about all of these women that I adore, and to learn more about the ones I didn’t really knew much about. Definitely an important book that gives voice to female writers! It allows readers to learn about their lives beyond their works (that many times are related), and how difficult it was for some of them to write and make a living out of it.

The fact that most of it is graphic novel made it so fast to read, and the illustrations were beautifully done.

I admittedly didn't expect there would be women in this book I hadn't heard of previously, but here we are. With a perfect balance of text and illustration, Why She Wrote provided an excellent history not only of historical female authors but the reasonings for why they ended up becoming who they are known as. This would be an excellent addition to school curriculums, both high school and college level.

An ideal book for our list. This is an incredibly interesting provocative book about a female writers. I highly recommend

This is a very interesting book. I love learning more about classic authors and, of course, about the women who managed to get their work published back then. Despite all the difficulties, their novels are still praised and the story behind the women is often very interesting.
And that is the part of the book I really enjoyed, the one where we learn about these women and why they decide to write their books. In some cases, it was even more interesting, since I was not as aware of those writer's background. However, the graphic novel part of the book was not my cup of tea. I appreciate it, and it definitely adds something different and interesting to the book. But I found myself wanting more of the text and less of the drawings.

Why She Wrote by Hannah K. Chapman and Lauren Burke and illustrated by Kaley Bales was not at all what I thought it would be - in the best way! It is a unique storytelling format, one that kind of reminded me of Once Again to Zelda but in graphic novel format. Each chapter begins with a one page bio of the author followed by a short graphic novelization of a scene from their life.

Why She Wrote is not comprehensive, but that’s also not the intent - it provides snapshots of some of literature’s most influential authors, and would be great for getting young adults interested in them (I could see using excerpts to introduce a text to students). However, the content is definitely not for children.

I’m so excited to explore their podcast, Bonnets at Dawn, which inspired the book!

As a result of this book, I have been introduced to the writings of women that I had never heard of. In addition to this, the curtain has been pulled back on their life stories and motivations. I was amazed by Frances Burney who wrote about her horrendous experience of undergoing a mastectomy in 1812 for presumed breast cancer. I was impressed by the creativity and courage of Beatrix Potter who sought to protect the rights to her children's stories. Sui Sin Far wrote about her experience of being Eurasian in 19th century Canada and chose to use her writings to advocate for the Chinese communities of North America. I enjoyed the stories about these women and was a little surprised by their secrets that they managed to keep hidden from public view. The illustrations were less enjoyable than I expected them to be. At times they failed to capture how I imagined the women might act. "Feisty and strong" does not mean "angry and bolshy"; perhaps that it is how I felt these depictions came across. The illustrations for Frances Hodgson Burnett is a case in point.

Why She Wrote is a wonderful book to learn more about women writers from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. The book highlights a significant moment from each writer's life and retells it through comics. Biographical text, bibliographies, and fun facts are also included.

This is such a beautiful and fun compilation. I read the book in just one day and enjoyed every page. The Art work is amazing and the stories are easy to read. I would recommend Why She Wrote to people who like to learn more about (the history and lifes of) female writers and who enjoy graphic novels.

It is the perfect book to have on hand, to give as gift to any woman or girl. Like other books, it brings together the most important femenin writers in English literature, but the uniqueness of this book is in the way its authors give it.
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Eighteen women, eighteen lives each unique and unrepeatable. This book addresses the similarities, their ambitions, and their struggles. Emphasize work and unites them through her greatest passion and struggles and analyzes the way in which their work inspires or guides other writers.
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It is both a biography and an essay on the importance of women in the world of letters, a book that motivates and fascinates anyone who reads it. Simply beautiful and with illustrations that complete and mold each piece of life narrated
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I read it in one day, and I love every word, it is one of those books that you want to have at home and go back to his pages full of inspiration I really enjoyed it
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Thanks to #NetGalley and #Chroniclesbooks for letting my read #WhySheWrote before goes on sale the 20 April of 2021

A-M-A-ZING!

This is the kind of book I didn't know I was waiting for my entire reading life!

I have read too many graphic novels all these years but something like this is a first!

Women authors. Most familiar but some of them still not yet talked much about. Thanks to this fun, beautiful illustrated compilation of all these authors describing them and featuring some of their most important works.

Non-fiction, book about books and authors will never be this fun again I tell you!

I find the artwork quite invested and well done. It's so cool to actually know which parts of these authors' lives to be presented in such few pages like stories well portrayed through ink and colors!

I personally like the later half of the book much better as I see much improvements in the representation, description and the art sequence there, and not because of the authors in the second half.

Yes, it reminds me. The best part of the book is that it shows equality in the representation of all these 18 women authors regardless of their work, their popularity or their background.

Kudos to the team.

Thank you so much for the advanced reader ecopy.

I assure you this book will be so much beautiful in its physical version!

Damn 💞

This was a very nice book about well know women authors. Each author was talked about and then a cartoon was shown for each. They involved a pivotal moment in the authors life. At the end of each subject, they would have a list of the works that each woman wrote. The lesser known authors were really interesting to me. It showed how far women authors have come. In the past, women weren't even allowed to have their name on their book, they would go under a mail name. Many publishers didn't want a woman to have written stories, even if they were good. If you like history or reading about some famous authors, this book is for you!!

I really appreciate books about canonized authors, this graphic novel version is full of exciting details the common person might not know about the female authors they have read or will read in school. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley have big fav's of mine for most of my life and here is a book I can enjoy while I need a break from the text formatting of a "real" book.

Well, this successfully manages to spin off from any podcast that may have launched these creators' careers. It's not a brilliant book, but will be exceedingly welcome for the educator seeking to have something concentrating on females in the English language canon. Starting almost from a position of 'nobody really cares that women wrote anything', the authors have managed to put together a book that hardly features the voice or opinion of a male. We get an introduction, fair enough, after which the book is split into six parts, each with their own opening notes and each with three authoresses to cover. That coverage is again a primer to their biography, and then we get the core of the book – graphic novel representations of their lot and their life. So Mary Shelley, who we open with, is of course shown mulling over "Frankenstein", but we see how public opprobrium of her life choices and the loss of a baby woke some of the horrors of her novel. Ann Radcliffe is shown failing to bat away stupid thoughts and comment at a dinner party she would rather never have been at. Charlotte Bronte gets inspiration from a haunted house and some of her own pent-up emotion.

What I had to feel a flaw with these pages was that the graphic novels were written very young – they're visually and textually primary school stuff – apart that is, from a wilful love of warping the timeline until it snaps here and there. But the writing here (beyond the closing trivia that each author gets as an appendix) seemed fit for an audience a few years older. Overall the chapters do convey the women involved, but it did feel to me as if not one but two target audiences were being aimed at – the young scholar interested in the background to the literature, and the even younger reader who may delight in seeing some of that fashioned as a cartoon, years before the words 'set text' get to worry their mind.

Errant chronology helps serve the way the women have been lumped into trios, but not the history of them all – this book wants to show connections from one to another where at all possible, but also to hide that behind a wall of time-changes. It did do the dutiful thing as a kids' book of teaching this adult something, for I was certainly not aware there was a real story behind the "Gentleman Jack" TV series, although as it was a quite yawnsome 'here's how I selled me coal up in t'Yorkshire' story I was losing no sleep either way. But in acclaiming the graft, the individuality, the bravery sometimes, of being a standout female writer, is where this volumes virtues would lie. It's just that, considering how easy it is to imagine a less unwieldy and more straightforward book than the one I saw, the star rating has to remain as it is.

Pub Date: April 20, 2021
I adored this one! It was so beautifully illustrated and the concept of focusing on women authors of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries - who pioneered the lit scene for women - was fantastic. I enjoyed learning more about authors such as Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and the Bronte sisters. The format is that of which each woman is celebrated with a summary of what inspired her to write, followed by graphics that depict a pivotal moment in her life. This book explores women and their untold histories, including: "The success of Little Women, the diary of the 'first modern lesbian,' Austen's struggle with writer's block, and the forgotten mother of the gothic genre" (@netgalley). Highly recommend this book! Overall, I gave it 4.5/5 Stars.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

'Why She Wrote' is a graphic novel illustrating the most remarkable moments of the famous classic women writers during the 18th and 19th centuries. The authors tried to capture the different aspects of these writers and portrayed it beautifully. It's no doubt that the eminence can't be captured in a 300-page book. But the most one can do is celebrate their becoming. And that's what I love about the book the most.

It celebrates not just authors and their works, but their becoming. Their stories, their similarities. How each of them inspired the other and why they disguised under a different name. As a fan of women writers and classics. I loved each snippet. The illustrations are neat and beautiful. This book can be read by any age group. There would be something new to learn and know for everyone. I would love to reread it sometime later in a paperback or hardcover format.

I'll love to see if they decide to make a sequel of this for more female writers of the 19th and 20th century too. I would love to see an illustrated version extending to Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath.

Thanks to Netgalley and Chronicle Books for an advanced copy for review. It was a delight reading this book. And I would buy a hard copy when it's released. It's just that good.

You can also find this review on my blog: https://thebooktoldmethat.wordpress.com/

WHY SHE WROTE: A GRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE LIVES, INSPIRATION, AND INFLUENCE BEHIND THE PENS OF CLASSIC WOMEN WRITERS by Hannah K. Chapman and Laura Burke, illustrated by Kaley Bales is about eighteen women writers: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Bronte, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances E. W. Harper, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Anne Lister, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far), Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot), Anne Bronte (Acton Bell), Beatrix Potter, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Louisa May Alcott.

I really liked the format. The book is divided into six chapters. Each chapter features three authors connected by the same theme. For example, one of the chapters is called "Activism as Art". Every chapter starts with a short introduction. Two pages of text. Then the author is introduced. A page with a name, portrait, the year when she was born-the year when she died, and a citation from her work. Here is my favorite example of a quote: "Nothing is impossible to a determined woman." Louisa May Alcott, THE ABBOT'S GHOST OR MAURICE TREHERNE'S TEMPTATION, 1867. After that, there is one page about that author (text only), followed by approximately ten pags of comics about a pivotal moment in her life. After that, there are some interesting facts about her and a list of selected works.

Beautiful illustrations. I'll definitely look up the work of Kaley Bales. Her art is spot on.

Diversity!!! What I love the most about this book is that features the authors of color, too.

Inspiring stories. It's a book about perseverance. These writers lived in different times (the 18th, the 19th, and the 20th centuries), but all of them felt trapped and confined. They couldn't inherit property, couldn't vote, could't get divorced. And yet, despite all the obstacles, they persisted and kept writing. They faced rejection, stigmas, and criticism. They struggled. But they kept fighting. Fighting for their rights. The dared to defy.

The focus of this book is on similarities of their stories and connections that emerged upon the analysis of their works and lives. And it's fascinating!

By the way, I really loved the note about Johanna Ortner, the doctoral student who managed to find a copy of the Frances E. W. Harper's first book called FOREST LEAVES. So many people thought that this book was lost, and a student found a perfect copy in the archive in 2015. How cool is that?

At university, I was forced to read some of the books written by these authors. To be absolutely candid with you, it was really hard. MIDDLEMARCH by George Eliot, WIVES AND DAUGHTERS and NORTH AND SOUTH by Elizabeth Gaskell, etc... Back then, I preferred to read the novels about Percy Jackson. But this book... it changed my perspective. It gave me a reason to care.

E-galley was provided by NetGalley for an honest review. Thank you so much!

I found the premise for Why She Wrote to be super interesting. The introduction made me super excited to read the rest of the book.

The book is divided into chapters that feature three to four female writers. Each author has a portrait and a one-page biography. This is then followed by several pages of graphic storytelling and finally two pages that contained factoids, like connections to other authors, and selected works.

I found this approach to be really disjointed. The transition from written biography to graphic storytelling was often confusing. At first, I was unsure if the graphic portion was supposed to be a clip from their lives or a scene from one of their books. There was never an introduction to what exactly it was, and it didn't always connect to the biography. The chapters also were not tied together. I would have also liked there to be additional modern writers, especially BIPOC, such as Maya Angelou so that the book is not primarily white Europeans.

As far as images and format go, it was okay. Within the graphic sections, I found that the script font used was difficult to read and the rest of the font to be unattractive. The images themselves I liked although it was often difficult to tell one person apart from another.

Overall, I ended up liking the concept much better than the actual book. It was a great idea that was not executed well. I think the book has a lot of potential but needs significant editing and changes prior to being published.

Very interesting topic and take on it.

Good overview and introduction to famous female authors and depictions of a pivotal moment in each of their lives. We read these authors but don't think much about them really and this book gives us a glimpse into their lives and motivations and whets the appetite to learn more about them.
The half-comic format works great depicting the important moment of inspiration, backlash, despair, and emotion that gave us timeless works.

This is not the most in-depth book but the short bios balance well with the comics.

Why She Wrote offers a look into the lives and motivations of many well loved female authors. Although I loved the diversity and inclusivity(it was not solely white straight women), this book wasn’t really for me. While it was very informative, it was mainly just a straight biography. There was some inclusion of graphics, but those were quite short and many of the fonts were unreadable.
I will say though that many will love this book! Those who really like informative texts especially will find this book to their liking. And I did love the way the book was formatted!
Another notable fact is that I finished this book in one sitting! The book is very engaging, but not really my thing. I will check out the authors other works and maybe the podcast that is mentioned though!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an arc of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.