These Particular Women

In this strong collection, Meads (Dear DeeDee) brings together essays about famous 20th-century women, with an emphasis on authors. She parses the works and lives of such household names as Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath, holding up disagreements between Virginia Woolf’s biographers about her “sexual frigidity” and mental illness as a testament to the vagaries of historiography and the complexity of Woolf. Other pieces explore the writings of lesser-known figures: in “Encounter with a Text/Subtext,” Meads bemusedly surveys the outdated advice laid out in home economics professor Grace Margaret Morton’s popular 1943 textbook, The Arts of Costume and Personal Appearance, which chastises women too “absorbed in intellectual pursuits” for “so-called feminine frivolities.” Among the highlights are Meads’s comedic account of her visit to the neglected tourist attraction of Margaret Mitchell’s onetime Atlanta apartment, and “Mothers Inc.,” which examines how the mothers of Flannery O’Connor and Sylvia Plath coped with the early deaths of their famous daughters and managed their legacies. The insightful contributions offer nuanced portraits of Meads’s subjects while thoughtfully probing the intersections of art, femininity, and fame. The result is a soulful meditation on how women are alternately obscured and revealed by the turns of history. (Apr.)