Books in The Barnard Biography Series series

Victorian Society recoiled at the thought of a woman learning about the human body. Yet in 1847, Elizabeth Blackwell was determined to become a physician--one who would not just improve the practice of medicine, but would also provide desperately needed medical care for the women of her time. Author Nancy Kline vividly recreates Blackwell's world and her struggle to gain knowledge and acceptance in the closed, males only world of medicine.

Lorraine Hansberry tells the fascinating story of the brave and talented woman who, almost single-handedly, overcame the racial obstacles that made for a segregated American theatre in the years following World War II. Hansberry was just twenty-nine years old when her play A Raisin in the Sun opened in 1959--an era wher her very existence as a black, female writer wwas considered unusual. The play was an overnight sensation, earning its author the double distinction of being the youngest playwright and first black person to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. In Hansberry's own words, A Raisin in the Sun "tells the truth about people... We have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks people who are the very essence of human dignity. That is what, after all the laughter and tears, the play is supposed to say."

Mary Shelley, daughter of feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin, lived a life that seems lifted from the pages of the gothic romances that would someday make her immortal. Born during a violent storm, cast from British society at age sixteen, she was abandoned by her father for running away with the rebel poet Percy Bysse Shelley. When she was just nineteen, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein--the world's first work of science fiction and a novel that would change the face of English literature.

A young man is drawn to the warmth of a campfire on a cold, early winter night to meet the most curious and frightening of travelers. The traveler’s tale seems to be just the ranting of an old, one-eyed storyteller or is he truly the Sapphire Knight, as he claims? Famed storyteller Michael Sullivan writes for primary and middle readers. With The Sapphire Knight, he takes fantasy to a deeper level that will give young readers more reason to fear the Dark Woods.