Born in Paris to Cuban parents, Anaïs Nin was a prolific writer who detailed the intimate details of her personal life in numerous journals, many of which were eventually published. Nin’s shrewd understanding of the human condition is reflected in this quote from a November 1941 journal entry, in which she addressed a friend’s instinct to run from confusion. “You can’t run away,” she told her friend. “It’s destructive.” Facing life’s uncertainties head on — even if it means muddling through them until we find clarity — is how we come to better understand who we are and what we want.

Virginia Woolf’s extended essay “A Room of One’s Own” is one of the seminal texts of feminist literature. The essay explored a range of themes, from gender inequality and the subjectivity of truth, to the nature of creativity and the need for financial independence. The essay’s title derives from this latter point, asserting that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf praised Jane Austen and Emily Brontë, who each had the strength and freedom of mind to ignore the pressures of criticism in a patriarchal society, and produced truly authentic literature. These two authors, Woolf explained, were unshrinking in their genius and integrity. “They wrote as women write, not as men write,” Woolf observed — which, especially in their time, was a brave act of creative defiance.