Laurie Lisle

Westover: Giving Girls a Place of Their Own
Westover, a girls' school in Middlebury, Connecticut, was founded in 1909 by emancipated "New Women," educator Mary Hillard and architect Theodate Pope Riddle. Landscape designer Beatrix Farrand did the plantings. It has evolved from a finishing school for the Protestant elite, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's first love, to a meritocracy for pupils of many religions and races from all over the world. This book describes the innovations of the idealistic minister's daughter who founded the school, her intellectual successor who turned it into a college preparatory school in the 1930s, the quiet headmaster who saved it during the turbulent 1970s, and the prize-winning mathematics teacher,wife, and mother who leads the school today. This beautifully illustrated book tells an important story about female education during decades of dramatic change in America.

Four Tenths of an Acre: Reflections on a Gardening Life
Ten personal essays touch upon important issues in women's lives—love and loss, work and play, roots and restlessness, risk and refuge—as the author experienced them after becoming a gardener. The long, narrow half-acre in a New England village became the terra firma that enabled her to endure emotional storms and while providing ongoing pleasure and a reason for optimism. Part garden book and part memoir, this book celebrates the role of nature in a contemporary life.

Portrait of An Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe
The paintings of this famed and esteemed matriarch of modern American art reflect her great talent, originality, and fierce independence. Born on a Wisconsin farm, O'Keeffe was a young Texas art teacher before her romance with the older photographer Alfred Stieglitz, a leader of the New York avant-garde. Over her long life she created an astonishing visual vocabulary of large sensuous flowers, forboding Manhattan skyscrapers, white animal skulls, and the red hills of her beloved New Mexico.

Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life
This sculptor's life was remarkable for its intensity, passion, and commitment to her work. From her birth in Russia, girlhood in Maine, and her life as an artist in Manhattan, existence was difficult and dramatic. Throughout her life her beauty and flamboyance made her a controversial figure in the art world. But after years of struggle her rich iconography, expressed in large black, white, and gold wood assemblages, amounted to a huge and astonishing body of work that made an indelible stamp on American art.

Without Child: Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness
Without Child explores the childless woman’s relationship to mothers and mothering, to femininity, to men, to creativity and achievement, to her body, and to old age. It begins with the inner journey she makes before deciding or realizing that she will not bear children. Weaving a variety of rich materials from history, literature, religion, sociology, as well as the author's own story, this social history does what no other book as done before--presents people without children from the past and present in a multifaceted and positive light.

Some essays and articles

"My Westover"
In Westover: Giving Girls a Place of Their Own, 2009

"Heart"
In Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Spring 2003

"On Being O'Keeffe's First Biographer,"
In From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O'Keeffe as Icon, 1992

"Viewing O'Keeffe" and "More on O'Keeffe"
In Journal of the Southwest,Summer 1988 and Summer 1993

"Reporting: Kenya-The Last Stand of a Peaceable Kingdom"
In The Village Voice, April 1, 1971