About

Longer bio:

Anne Boyd is the author of the bestselling Substack newsletter, Audacious Women, Creative Lives , where she shares stories of iconoclastic women writers and artists, and writes about her own decision to leave academia and the US to start her life over in Europe. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, Lit Hub, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has been interviewed on the BBC, NPR, CBS Sunday Morning, and radio programs in Ireland, Sweden, and Australia. 

In her former life, she was an expert on American women writers, fostering renewed appreciation for their forgotten or undervalued works. The recipient of four National Endowment for the Humanities awards (including two for public scholarship), Anne has a Ph.D. in American Studies and was an English professor for twenty-three years. She served on the Board of Directors of the Biographers International Organization for six years. Anne has edited four books and written three more, including Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (Norton 2018), which was an Indie bestseller and chosen as one of the best books of the year by Library Journal, The Daily Mail, and A Mighty Girl. It was also one of the best reviewed books (Lit Hub), one of the best books of August (Christian Science Monitor), a book not to miss (USA Today), and one of the best books of summer (Newsday). Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy was published to mark the 150th anniversary of the overlooked and underestimated classic, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, as was the deluxe edition of Little Women which Anne edited for Penguin Classics. A New York Times article about the anniversary prominently featured Anne and her work, as did numerous essays and reviews in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She also appeared on CBS Sunday Morning in a special feature about Greta Gerwig’s film of Little Women in 2019.

Anne’s 2016 book Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (Norton) also received considerable attention. It was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune and was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. This biography, and the collection of stories, Miss Grief and Other Stories, which Anne also edited, helped bring Woolson the renewed attention she deserved. A hauntingly beautiful writer praised by Colm Toibin in his foreword to the collection of stories, Woolson was famous in her day but neglected as the all-male American literary canon formed in the twentieth century. Anne also edited a collection of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s stories published by the prestigious Library of America in 2020, which received rave reviews from Cynthia Ozick and Michael Gorra.

Anne is also the author of Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America and editor of Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century, both published by Johns Hopkins University Press.