"World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman. How do we explain our newfound cultural investment in empathy and social justice?For decades, Joseph Campbell had defined our cultural aspirations in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, emphasizing the value of seeking glory and earning immortality. His work became the playbook for Hollywood, with its many male-centric quest narratives. Challenging the models in Campbell's canonical work, Maria Tatar explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on social missions. Using the domestic arts and storytelling skills, they have displayed audacity, curiosity, and care as they struggled to survive and change the reigning culture. Animating figures from Ovid's Philomela, her tongue severed yet still weaving a tale about sexual assault, to Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander, a high-tech wizard seeking justice for victims of a serial killer, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present"-- - (Baker & Taylor)

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long-buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman. - (WW Norton)

The Heroine with 1,001 FacesThe Hero with a Thousand FacesIn a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their “mischief making” evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard’s wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a “hero’s journey,” but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care.The Heroine with 1,001 Faces - (WW Norton)

WickedThe Brides of MaracoorThe Heroine with 1,001 FacesThe Thousand and One NightsThe Heroine with 1,001 FacesTrickster Makes This WorldThe Heroine with 1,001 FacesInkheart—Henry Louis Gates Jr. - (WW Norton)

Booklist Reviews

For decades, storytellers have regarded Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a touchstone for comparative mythology. Prolific writer and scholar Tatar began her career steeped in Campbell's influence. In the years since then, she has amassed ample evidence that Campbell's magnum opus, while profound in its explanation of the hero's archetype, is boldly lacking inclusion of the feminine heroes who have defined courage for centuries. In this vast and impressive book, Tatar gives a new generation of storytellers a guide to writing brave, dynamic characters by presenting them with the boldest, most undeterred femmes of literature. She uses a wide breadth of examples, from Eve, Pandora, Circe, Jane Eyre, and Jo March to contemporaries like Carrie Bradshaw and Starr Carter of Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give. Tatar also highlights the importance of mythology in the work of specific writers like Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, and Anne Sexton. Impeccably researched and firmly rooted in a post-#MeToo mindset, this work is canonical for a new literary world. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

In The Gambler Wife, Russian literature scholar Kaufman unfolds the story of stubborn young stenographer Anna Snitkina, who discovered a sick and disillusioned man when she went to work for Fyodor Dostoyevsky and acted to heal him, becoming his wife and manager (pubbing August 31). To many, Mills will be Forever Young, having launched her career as a preteen and won the Academy Juvenile Award for Disney's Pollyanna, but here she unfolds an active artistic life. Biographer of McCartney, Springsteen, and Madonna, Rees now tackles Mellencamp, whom Billboard dubbed "arguably the most important roots rocker of his generation." A John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, celebrated cultural critic Smith should Shine Bright in her study showing Black women there at the creation of American pop. Short-listed for the Wolfson History Prize, Sturgis's Oscar Wilde: A Life draws on newly discovered letters, documents, first-draft notebooks, and the full transcript of the libel trial to give us a bigger picture of bigger-than-life Wilde. The John L. Loeb Professor of Folklore and Mythology and Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard, Tartar presents The Heroine with 1,001 Faces as counterbalance to Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, exploring women characters from Cassandra to Lisbeth Salander while shifting the emphasis for bloody glory-seeking to the deep-seated empathy and connection we seek today. When Verdelle published The Good Negress in 1995, she won early praise from Toni Morrison, which led to friendship even as Verdelle's next novel—a Western featuring Black characters—languished. All detailed, along with Verdelle's early struggles to write, in Miss Chloe (45,000-copy first printing).

Library Journal Reviews

Stories secure women's voices against fragmentation, slander, and disbelief and can disrupt and change prevailing discourse, argues folklorist Tatar (Harvard Univ.; The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales). Her feminist literary analysis surveys the craft and traditions that enable stories' longevity, and ties them to contemporary efforts to amplify voices through modern narratives and the Me Too movement. More than a rebuttal to Joseph Campbell's seminal text The Hero with A Thousand Faces, Tatar's book offers the infinite experiences of women; its title recalls Scheherazade's 1001, a number for endless enumeration and feminine resilience. Engaging with the works of Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Anne Sexton, and many others, Tatar explores the historical and textual difficulties of having a voice. She offers a condensed study in the language of those marginalized by gender and colonialism; although they've been devaluated as gossip and limited to the domestic sphere, women's stories persist. Tatar brings to the surface the overlooked tales of women who endure, spanning Greek myth and box office franchises. Illustrations of fairytales offer insight into their evolution throughout the centuries. VERDICT A necessary and compelling read for scholars, activists, and storytellers interested in inclusive revisions to the hero's canon.—Asa Drake, Marion Cty. P.L., FL