A few years into her marriage and feeling societal pressure to surrender to domesticity, Joanna Biggs found herself longing for a different kind of existence. Was this all there was? She divorced without knowing what would come next. Newly untethered, Joanna returned to the free-spirited writers of her youth and was soon reading in a fever—desperately searching for evidence of lives that looked more like her own, for the messiness and freedom, for a possible blueprint for intellectual fulfillment.
A moving biblio-memoir that’s a gift to readers of all ages, especially those in midlife who want to stroll down the memory lane of their formative reading experiences ... The book’s engaging, breezy chapters explore each subject’s life and writings in chronological order ... Biggs serves up amuse-bouche anecdotes about each figure ... The resulting juxtapositions are often poignant, albeit with few surprises ... Biggs doesn’t approach these monumental writers as one’s professor would have. Instead, she writes about them as if reminiscing about late, lamented friends ... There’s precious little material considering authorship, marriage or divorce in context. History is glossed over. Class and economics come up only glancingly. Intersectional approaches aren’t the book’s strong suit ... About this lack, Biggs is again charmingly self-deprecating ... A Life of One’s Own has much to offer readers new to its subjects.
A Life of One’s Own is itself the writerly achievement she had hoped for, which means that the larger story of her absorbing, eccentric book is the story of how she came to write it ... Biggs is an attentive reader ... Biggs’s book is fuelled by faith in the transmission of feeling as knowledge ... Alongside Biggs’s search for a way to be a woman apart from being a wife is her search for a way to be a writer apart from being a critic. On the evidence of A Life of One’s Own, she has found it.
[An] unusual blend of memoir, criticism and literary biography ... Biggs seems to take a more jaded view of marriage, hardly crediting that any woman might survive it with her independence and spirit intact ... Biggs has chosen women who put their own lives into their writing – as has she.
