Women's History Month is the perfect time to celebrate the accomplishments of women writers, but it's also important to remember famous heroines, who have played such a major role in our literature. Read more about the writers, and then discover some of our most unforgettable female characters.

Here are a few quotes:

• "I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me na�ve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman." - Ana�s Nin
  
  
• "Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men." - Joseph Conrad
  
  
• "I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves." - Mary Wollstonecraft
  
  
• "And the crazy part of it was even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in... underneath it, all you longed to be was annihilated by love..." Erica Jong

Discover more resources for the month of March (Women's History Month... and beyond)!

• Famous Fictional Heroines
• Women Writers & Famous Heroines
• Women's History - Jone Johnson Lewis
• A Woman Young and Old - William Butler Yeats
• The Rights of Women - Anna Laetitia Aikin (Barbauld)
• Vindication on the Rights of Women - Mary Wollstonecraft
• On the Education of Women - Daniel Defoe
• We As Women
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Herland
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Read more about the characters and writers in literary history.

How do you react to literature? Does a book or a poem ever strike you in a powerful way? Do you ever feel like writing about it: getting all of your ideas down in words? Your thoughts may seem jumbled, and not all cohesive yet, but keeping a reading log is a great way to react to the literature you're reading. Read on:

• How to Keep a Reading Log
• Books on Reading
• Book Journals
• Reading - Walden
• The Art of Writing

React to what you read!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular American poet of the 19th century. His famous works included Evangeline, The Building of the Ship, The Children's Hour, The Village Blacksmith, and more.

In A Psalm of Life, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writes:

"Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem."

Read more about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--born on February 27, 1807.

Christopher Marlowe was born on February 6, 1564, but he was baptized on February 26. Beyond his fame as a spy for the Queen's Privy Council, he was a poet and dramatist, who is known for works like The Jew of Malta and The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. The span of his dramatic career lasted a short 6 years. At the age of 29, Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl. In "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," Marlowe writes:

"Come live with me, and be my love;
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields."