If you’re just joining us, you may want to click over to yesterday’s post. If you already read it, are you ready for the answers? But first, here are a few more famous authors. Can you guess who they are?

Mystery Woman #4:
This Italian-American author wrote for the New York Times and eventually won a Pulitzer Commentary award. She left journalism behind for a career as a novelist, and of her five best-sellers, three have become films. Much of her nonfiction works centered on the death of her mother when she was nineteen, and some consider her best material to be on motherhood and raising her three children. She has also written on feminist topics and materialism in America. One of her best-known quotes is, “The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make. … I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of [my three children] sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages six, four, and one. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.”

Mystery Woman #5:
This female author, a Pulitzer prize winner, released her nineteenth novel in 2012. She was raised among the Quaker colonies of North Carolina and Raleigh and didn’t attend school until she was eleven, which helped her view the world, in her words, “with a certain amount of distance and surprise.” She married an Iranian psychiatrist, who died in 1997, and has two children. Her stories usually involve an intriguing elderly protagonist who is looking back on life and remembering events. While her plots are considered slow, her characters are well-developed and the smaller moments ignite the suspense for which she is best known.

Mystery Woman #6:
Our final author was an English novelist in the 1800’s. Her mother was also an author, of a famous feminist social study. Though the author’s mother died when she was eleven days old, her father raised her with a strong emphasis on progressive education. She married one of her father’s political followers, ensuring ostracism from English society for the first few years of their marriage. Her first three children didn’t make it into childhood, leaving her fourth son the only survivor. Her husband drowned when his sail boat was caught in a storm. After his death, she devoted herself to raising her son and her writing career. Her work is among the first of the science fiction genre and was instantly popular. (She originally published anonymously.)

Alright, you ready? Here’s the answers:

Mystery Woman #1: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Mystery Woman #2: Danielle Steel

Mystery Woman #3: Mary Higgins Clark

Mystery Woman #4: Anna Quindlen

Mystery Woman # 5: Anne Tyler

Mystery Woman #6: Mary Shelly (most famous for Frankenstein)

I think every woman and every mother has something equally important to say, and we all do it differently. I’ve read some mommy blogs that were so powerful they brought me to tears. I’ve seen websites that lifted my spirits, and read novels that changed the way I saw the world. Fiction, nonfiction, news articles, blogs, whatever. I agree with Ms. Stowe: “I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.”
The success of these women are all inspirational, but the most inspirational part of their stories is this: they were regular women, with kids and bills and relationship problems. But they kept writing. Persistence paid off for them, and it can pay off for any aspiring or struggling author as well.
Ladies, keep writing. We have some big—and hopefully fashionable—shoes to fill.

Guest blog by