Orphan Girl

A long-lost seventeenth-century poetic text exemplifying women's writing in the early modern period.

Written in 1685, Orphan Girl traces the life of the Polish noblewoman Anna Stanisławska (1651–1700) as she writes candidly and unsparingly about the course of her life, from her infancy to the time of her second widowhood, and ultimately her withdrawal from a world of which she no longer wants any part. Stanisławska was an incomparable memoirist, revealing the tumultuous course of her three marriages. Described as one of the nine female Polish writers you need to read before you die, she is a writer whose stridency and directness of authorial voice would not be matched until modern times.