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Our latest title: Žemaite’s: Marriage for Love, translated by Violeta Kelertas and Maryte Racys.

books to stir your soul

How did a penniless nineteenth-century farm woman with an alcoholic husband, seven children, and little education, living in a rural backwater of the tsarist Russian empire far from any centers of culture, manage to become the initiator of literary prose fiction in the Lithuanian language and write six volumes of stories, plays, and letters? Not only that, but she also distinguished herself as a feminist activist against patriarchy, especially the centuries-long tradition of arranged marriages. During World War I while based in Chicago, she traveled the United States for five years, giving speeches from Illinois to New Hampshire to advocate for relief for the famine and suffering in her war-torn country.

The writer Julija Žymantienė, popularly known by her pseudonym Žemaitė (meaning a woman from the Lowlands of Lithuania), lived from 1845 to 1921. Her works became classics of Lithuanian literature not only because she was the first writer of prose fiction whose prime motives for writing were secular and social rather than religious or didactic, but because she also committed herself to fighting for human rights throughout her lifetime. Although she is primarily associated with feminism, she had an innate and pervasive feeling for all kinds of injustice. Beyond her concerns of making life better for women, she always felt compassion for the serfs (men, women, and children) in her surroundings as well.