Heroines

Kate Zambreno's genre defining manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a generation of writers and scholars, reissued after more than a decade with a new introduction by Jamie Hood


On the last day of December 2009, Kate Zambreno, then an unpublished writer, began an online blog for her highly informed and passionate rants, and her heartfelt and melancholy portraits of the modernist 'wives and mistresses,' reclaiming the traditionally pathologised biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased and institutionalised.


In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it, she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the 'minor,' and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. 'ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological,' writes Zambreno. 'When he does, it's existential.'


A book that has become its own canon, Heroines was named one of the '50 Books that define the past 5 Years in Literature' by Flavorwire, an 'Essential Feminist Manifesto' by Dazed, and one of the '50 Greatest Books by Women' in Buzzfeed.


'It's kind of a book of utterances... it's beautiful and I love it'
Kristen Stewart


'If you thought you knew a lot about the "wives" of modernism and the various forms of silencing they suffered, Kate Zambreno's Heroines will teach you more; if you didn't know much, your mouth will fall open in enraged amazement'
Maggie Nelson


'A lush, lyrical feminist memoir'
Laurie Penny, New Statesman


'Zambreno doesn't write with the measured voice of someone who can count on being listened to, but with the wail of someone confined to a shed'
Sheila Heti, London Review of Books