The poems in The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present range from some of the earliest oral poetry, the first Buddhist spiritual poems written by women, and bold works by today's youth. Whether it is the historical expulsion of the Chinese or the cultivation of silk worms, this volume speaks to the exceptional moments and everyday realities of women's lives, of love and war,...

In 1907, in a quiet English village, Theodora Bosanquet answered Henry James's call for someone to transcribe his edits and additions to his formidable body of work. The aging James had agreed to revise his novels and tales into the twenty-four-volume New York Edition. Enter Bosanquet, a budding writer who would record the dictated revisions and the prefaces that would become a lynchpin of his legacy.

Embracing the role of amanuensis and creative counterpoint cautiously at first, Bosanquet kept a daily diary over the nine years that she worked with James, as their extraordinary...