Daily Rituals Women at Work: How Great Women Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work

Description

A second book from Mason Currey, author of Daily Rituals. Daily Rituals: Women at Work includes one hundred profiles of female creators: artists, writers, film-makers, choreographers, and musicians. In Daily Rituals, Mason Currey brought us the daily routines of some of the world's most famous creative brains. But there was a problem. Only 17% of those profiles were about women: 'My idea for the book had been to profile the "great minds" of Western culture from the last few hundred years. Unfortunately, the side effect of focusing on the most well-known figures in Western literature, painting, and classical music is that they are overwhelmingly men.' In Daily Rituals: Women at Work, we see how brilliant female creators got to work, often in the face of sexism and opposition from those around them. Barbara Hepworth sculpted outdoors and Janet Frame wrote wearing earmuffs to block out the noise. Kate Chopin wrote with her six children 'swarming around her' whereas the artist Rosa Bonheur filled her bedroom with the sixty birds that inspired her work. Louise May Alcott wrote so vigorously - skipping sleep and meals - that she had to learn to write with her left hand to give her cramped right hand a break. From Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Bronte to Nina Simone and Jane Campion, this is a book full of the day-to-day lives of some of the world's most brilliant creative minds who - no matter what stood in their way - found the time and got to work.

Mason Currey was born in Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. His first book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work was published in 2013. Currey's writing has appeared in Slate, Metropolis, and Print. He lives in New York.

Utterly fascinating . . . This book is the ultimate retort to the flaneurs who dream about the novel/screenplay/painting they would create if only they had the time -- Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times on Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration and Get to Work I just can't recommend this book enough -- Lena Dunham on Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration and Get to Work