Find out more about the fabulous writers from decades past that have been featured in The Lemonwood Quarterly!
Neith Boyce (1872-1951) was a playwright, journalist, and writer of short stories and novels. Boyce was a founding member of the Provincetown Players Theater Company, and her play Constancy was one of its first productions. Boyce’s work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, Collier’s, Vogue, Ainslee’s, and McClure’s Magazine, among others. Neith Boyce frequented the Greenwich Village literary salons hosted by Mabel Dodge Luhan, with whom she developed a close friendship and traveled to Europe. Their circle of friends included Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Gertrude Steine, and Djuna Barnes. Neith Boyce married the journalist and editor, Hutchins Hapgood, with whom she had four children and a famously open marriage. ‘The Head of the House’, included in this Spring 2025 issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly, was originally published by Fox Duffield & Company in 1904, in The Folly of Others, a collection of short stories by Neith Boyce. Her story, ‘The Head of the House‘ appears in the Spring 2025 issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly.
Kate Chopin (1850 – 1904) began writing professionally in her forties as a widowed mother of six, shortly after her own mother died. She wrote short stories for city newspapers and magazines in St. Louis, Missouri, and was known for her stories’ regional Creole settings and their focus on women’s lives. Kate Chopin wrote only two novels in her life. Her most famous novel, The Awakening (1899), was widely panned as immoral, and languished without readership for decades. The book was rediscovered in the 1960’s, and Kate Chopin was re-evaluated as an early feminist writer. Her stories often delve into issues of race, class, privilege and morality. Kate Chopin was born into a wealthy family of slave owners and married a New Orleans plantation owner/cotton broker. When her husband died in 1882 and Kate Chopin discovered she was left with over $40,000 in debt (over a million dollars in today’s terms), she headed the remaining business for two years, until it became solvent and she was able to sell. Although her father had died when she was a child, her mother, Eliza Faris O’Flaherty, came from a monied French family with substantial resources; Eliza O’Flaherty financed the return of Kate Chopin and her children to St. Louis, where they were able to live in material comfort. When her mother died the following year, her doctor recommended that Kate Chopin once again take up her longstanding passion for writing, as a path out of depression and a channel for her energy. Kate Chopin’s story, ‘Miss McEnders‘ appears in the Winter 2026 issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly.
Susan Glaspell (1876 – 1948) was a journalist turned fiction-writer who was first known for her short stories. She later wrote novels (nine) and plays (fifteen), and was a co-founder and featured playwright of The Provincetown Players creative theater collective (which also produced several plays by Neith Boyce). Glaspell’s work often explores themes of gender and social issues, ethical conflicts, and dissent. In 1931, Susan Glaspell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Alison’s House, a play based loosely on the life of Emily Dickinson. Her story, ‘Trifles‘ appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly.
Angelina Weld Grimké (1880 – 1958) was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a white mother and a mixed-race father. Relatives on both sides included activist abolitionists, while her paternal grandfather was a slave-owner. Grimké’s father was the second black man to graduate from Harvard Law School. Her parents divorced and Grimké had little or no contact with her mother after age seven. Grimké wrote essays, stories, poetry, and plays, much of which was published in NAACP newspapers. Although much of her work was completed prior to the Harlem Renaissance, Grimké published in several of the movement’s journals, and her social circles included many prominent figures from the Harlem Renaissance. Grimké is best known for the play Rachel (1916), which she wrote in response to the NAACP’s call for works to counter the very popular 1915 racist film The Birth of a Nation. In both Rachel and The Closing Door (featured in The Lemonwood Quarterly, Fall 2025), Grimké addresses racial discrimination, anti-black violence, and its impact on motherhood and the family. Grimké never married or had children. Many of her writings suggest she was lesbian or bisexual. Her story, ‘The Closing Door‘ appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly.
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), a member of the modernist movement, began writing short stories as a teenager in New Zealand. She moved permanently to Europe when she was 19, becoming part of the circle of modernists that included Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. She was strongly influenced by the short stories of Anton Chekov. Although she was married twice to different men, and had many male lovers, Katherine Mansfield was openly bisexual and her female lovers are well documented, both in her own journals and elsewhere. Her one documented pregnancy miscarried when she was 21 years old. Katherine Mansfield became an increasingly prolific and respected writer, especially in her late 20’s to early 30’s, after she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Her last years were spent writing and in pursuit of a cure for her tuberculosis; she spent long stretches at sanitoriums and sought out experimental treatments. When she died of tuberculosis in 1923, at age 34, she left behind several published volumes of short stories and poetry, as well as a large body of work that her surviving husband, John Murray, published as two short story collections and one book of poetry. Her story, ‘The Stranger‘ appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly.
Ethel Watts Mumford (1878-1940) was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright from New York City. As her career as an author grew, her husband, a lawyer named George Mumford, began to object to her commitment to writing. Ethel Watts Mumford divorced her husband, and moved to San Francisco with their young son, vowing never to marry again unless the man accepted her career as a writer. She had a prolific career spanning the years from 1900 to 1925. She married Peter Geddes Grant in 1906 and some of her work may be found listed under the name Ethel Watts Mumford Grant. The author’s portrait above is from an advertisement in the June 1908 issue of New Broadway Magazine. Her story ‘Her Groove‘ appears in the Winter 2025 issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly.
George Sand (1804-1876) became a best-selling author in her late twenties with the 1832 publication of her first novel, Indiana. Sand was a prolific novelist and playwright, and her work remained highly popular throughout her lifetime. Her novels frequently centered around female protagonists and issues of social class and gender roles. George Sand was politically active in France and a champion for the poor and for the rights of women. She was born into a fairly wealthy family and was raised by her paternal grandmother after her father’s death when she was four. As an adult, George Sand’s social circle included Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert. Sand was considered scandalous by many in her day for her pen name (male), her clothing (often trousers), her cigar smoking, her attendance at gatherings for men, her divorce from the father of her two children, and her subsequent many romantic affairs, including with the composer Frederic Chopin, who lived with George Sand for several years at the country estate she inherited from her grandmother. George Sand’s story, ‘Queen Coax‘ appears in the Spring 2026 issue of The Lemonwood Quarterly.