Daily Rituals Women at Work

From those who are the masters of their craft (Eudora Welty, Lynn Fontanne, Penelope Fitzgerald, Marie Curie) to those who were recognized in a burst of acclaim (Lorraine Hansberry, Zadie Smith)...from Clara Schumann and Shirley Jackson, carving out small amounts of time from family life, to Isadora Duncan and Agnes Martin, rejecting the demands of domesticity, Currey shows us the large and small (and abiding) choices these women made — and continue to make — for their art, and the rituals (daily and otherwise) that guide these artists. 

Germaine de Staël...Elizabeth Barrett Browning...George Eliot...Edith Wharton...Virginia Woolf...Edna Ferber...Doris Lessing...Pina Bausch...Frida Kahlo...Marguerite Duras...Helen Frankenthaler...Patti Smith, and 131 more — on their daily routines, superstitions, fears, eating (and drinking) habits, and other finely (and not so finely) calibrated rituals that help summon up willpower and self-discipline, keeping themselves afloat with optimism and fight, as they create (and avoid creating) their creations.

“This outstanding compendium of women artists at work is an admirably succinct portrait of some distinctly uncommon lives. It is also consistently entertaining and full of insights.” Meryle Secrest

Mason Currey was born in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Currey’s first book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2013. He lives in Los Angeles.

For almost a dozen years now, I’ve been collecting information about the daily routines and working habits of great creative minds — first, for a blog that I launched in 2007, while procrastinating on a writing assignment due the following day; then for a book based on the blog...

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