Charlotte Gordon

Charlotte Gordon is an American writer, distinguished professor of humanities at Endicott College, and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction for her book Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley (2015). She has received a grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities.

This article is about the writer. For the Duchess of Richmond, née Lady Charlotte Gordon, see Charlotte Lennox, Duchess of Richmond.

Life

She was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1962, and received her B.A in English and American Literature from Harvard College. She received her M.A in Creative Writing and her Ph.D in Literature from Boston University.[1]

She was awarded the Massachusetts Book Award for non-fiction for her biography of the seventeenth-century poet, Anne Bradstreet, Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America's First Poet.[2] This was followed by The Woman Who Named God: Abraham's Dilemma and the Birth of Three Faiths,[3] which in the author's own words describes the "shadows, gaps and silences" in the biblical texts about Abraham, Sarah and Hagar.[4] Examining them as stories, and drawing on the Bible both as a source of literature and religion, she notes that "some of the most crucial western ideas about freedom come from Hagar".[5] Gordon was the 2012 Rose Thering Fellow from the Lubar Institute for her work exploring interfaith issues.

Her most recent book, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley (2015), is about the mother and daughter pair of writers. The first Mary died giving birth to the second in 1797, and, according to The Independent, "Gordon sheds new light on these visionary women who believed in making their own rules." It was named a Book of the Year by The London Times, a New York Times notable book, and favourably reviewed in Vogue, the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, The Wall Street Journal and many others..[6] Romantic Outlaws was the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week on August 10, 2015,[7] and won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award.[8]

See also

References
  1. Endicott College Profile Archived May 27, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
  2. Massachusetts Book Award: Mistress Bradstreet "Book Awards 2006". Archived from the original on 2011-07-20. Retrieved 2010-07-23.
  3. Review of The Woman Who Named God
  4. Gordon, Charlotte (2009) The Woman Who Named God: Abraham's Dilemma and the Birth of Three Faiths. New York: Little, Brown, xv
  5. Gordon, Charlotte (2009) The Woman Who Named God: Abraham's Dilemma and the Birth of Three Faiths. New York: Little, Brown, xiv
  6. Altenberg, Karin (17 July 2015). "Vindication of a Righteous Woman". Wall Street Journal.
  7. "BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Romantic Outlaws - the Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, Escape and Elopement".
  8. Alexandra Alter (March 17, 2016). "'The Sellout' Wins National Book Critics Circle's Fiction Award". The New York Times. Retrieved March 18, 2016.
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