A unique anthology of short stories and poetry by feminist contemporaries of Virginia Woolf, who were writing about work, discrimination, war, relationships and love in the early part of the 20th Century. Includes works by English and American writers Zelda Fitzgerald, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Radclyffe Hall, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf, alongside their recently rediscovered 'sisters' from around the world. This book offers a diverse and international array of over 20 literary gems from women writers living in Bulgaria, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Italy, Palestine, Romania, Russia, Spain and Ukraine.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was one of the four great Russian poets of the 20th century, along with Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak. She also wrote outstanding prose. Endowed with 'phenomenally heightened linguistic sensitivity' (Joseph Brodsky), Tsvetaeva was primarily concerned with the nature of poetic creation and what it means to be a poet. Among the most exciting of all explorations of this theme are the essays 'Art in the Light of Conscience', her spirited defence of poetry; 'The Poet on the Critic', which earned her the enmity of many; and 'The Poet and Time', the key to understanding her work. Her richly diverse essays provide incomparable insights into poetry, the poetic process, and what it means to be a poet. This book includes, among many fascinating topics, a celebration of the poetry of Pasternak ('Downpour of Light') and reflections on the lives and works of other Russian poets, such as Mandelstam and Mayakovsky, as well as a magnificent study of Zhukovsky's translation of Goethe's 'Erlking'. Even during periods of extreme personal hardship, her work retained its sense of elated energy and humour, and Angela Livingstone's translations bring the English-speaking reader as close as possible to Tsvetaeva's inimitable voice. First published in English in 1992, "Art in the Light of Conscience" includes an introduction by the translator, textual notes and a glossary, as well as revised translations of 12 poems by Tsvetaeva on poets and poetry.

During the Stalin years Russia had four great poets to voice the feelings of her oppressed people: Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetayeva. The first two survived the terror, but Mandelstam died in a camp and Tsvetayeva was driven to hang herself in 1941. This comprehensive selection of Tsvetayeva's poetry includes complete versions of all her major long poems and poem cycles: Poem of the End, An Attempt at a Room, Poems to Czechia and New Year Letter. It was the first English translation to use the new, definitive Russica text of her work. It also includes additional versions ascribed to F.F. Morton which first appeared in The New Yorker: these rhyming translations are actually the work of Joseph Brodsky (who lived at 44 Morton Street in New York).

Marina Tsvetaeva is among the great European poets of the twentieth century. With Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, she retained her humanity and integrity through Russia's 'terrible years' of the Great Terror. Even in her long, tragic exile, her roots were in Russia and the great tradition of Russian poetry. Her voice lives in part because it remains alert to her past, and to cultures, especially French, where she spent her exile. When Elaine Feinstein first read Tsvetaeva's poems in the 1960s, they transformed her. Their intensity and honesty spoke to her directly. To her first translations, published to acclaim in 1971, she added in later years, not least the sequence 'Girlfriend', dedicated to her lover Sofia Parnok. Feinstein published Tsvetaeva's biography in 1987.

The poems in this volume were composed between August 1917 and October 1918 and thus they span the most turbulent period of the 20th century in Russia, as the nascent republic was overthrown by the Bolsheviks and the country descended into civil war. This collection concentrates on the lyric poems that Tsvetaeva wrote at this time, whose importance should not be underestimated. Each offers a modest, unassuming gateway to the immense world of her imagination and her travailed, eternally questioning and endangered humanity, even those with a missing word or phrase she did not find the time to locate and craft amidst the overwhelming flow of inspiration. Like the events which formed their background, these poems raise ethical and human issues to which no simple answers can be found. And when Tsvetaeva announces, as the winter of 1918-1919 approaches, that 'It befits heroes to be frozen', she prompts us to consider the nature of her own, personal heroism at a stage when the very worst was still to come.

Marina Tsvetaeva is acknowledged today as one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, a masterful innovator who produced a remarkable body of work before her untimely death in 1941. This bilingual collection contains six of her acclaimed narrative poems, most translated into English for the first time. Tsvetaeva always regarded the narrative poem as her true challenge, and she created powerful and intensely original works in this genre. They can be seen as markers of various stages in her poetic development, ranging from the early, folk-accented 'On a Red Steed' to the lyrical-confessional 'Poem of the Mountain' and 'Poem of the End' to the more metaphysical later poems, 'An Attempt at a Room,' a beautiful requiem for Rainer Maria Rilke, 'New Year's Greetings,' and 'Poem of the Air,' a stirring celebration of Lindbergh's transatlantic flight and the quest for the soul's freedom. "There has been no more passionate voice in twentieth-century Russian literature." -Joseph Brodsky

The poems in Youthful Verses cover the years between 1913 and 1915, a period of unparalleled freedom in Marina Tsvetaeva's life. Recently married and with a baby daughter, she chronicles in a sequence of astonishing honesty and frankness her love for a slightly older woman poet. Despite a disturbing undercurrent of self-denigration, these poems are characterised throughout by deft humour, a pervasive sense of mischief, and a high degree of formal perfection.

Boris Pasternak is both the presiding spirit and the addressee of specific poems in After Russia, Marina Tsvetaeva's last collection, published in Paris 13 years before she died. The two poets engaged in an impassioned correspondence which offers crucial insights into the background and meaning of certain items. If a group of remarkably tender poems concerns the emigre critic Alexander Bakhrakh, remarkably little space is devoted to Tsvetaeva's cataclysmic affair with her husband's friend Konstantin Rozdevich during the last months of 1923. Towards the end, references to Russia and Russian culture-so studiously avoided earlier-flood back, making the final obeisance to a Russian peasant woman and to Pasternak in Moscow a fitting close.

After Russia (1928) is considered to mark the high point in Marina Tsvetaeva's output of shorter, lyrical poems. Tsvetaeva told Boris Pasternak that all that mattered in the book was its anguish. Breathtaking technical mastery and experimentation are underpinned by suicidal thoughts, a sense of exclusion from the circle of human love and companionship, and an increasing alienation from life itself. The sequence `Trees' evokes the hills and woods of Bohemia where Tsvetaeva loved to roam, while `Wires' takes telegraph wires as the central image for the geographical distance separating her from Pasternak.