Post- world War II, Victorian Female, and Romantic Period Female Literature Comparison of Language

Nora Ephron (1941–2012)

Responsible for writing some of the most heartwarming rom-coms of the nineties, filmmaker, playwright, writer, and journalist Nora Ephron succeeded in Hollywood in an era when few women sat in director or screenwriter chairs. 
Ephron was born in New York and raised in Los Angeles—two cities that she would continue to call home throughout her bicoastal life. Both informed her work; she often captured the charm of New York for the sets of Hollywood. Ephron’s scripts were hilariously acerbic, energizing, and ultimately redeeming of their female protagonists’ romantic foibles and philosophical crises, from You’ve Got Mail’s Kathleen Kelly to Sleepless in Seattle’s Annie Reed (both iconically portrayed by actress Meg Ryan). 
A polymath of the pen, Ephron’s career spanned five decades, from her days as a New York Post reporter and Esquire columnist, to her heyday in the nineties as a director and screenwriter, to her work as a playwright in the early aughts.

Janet Mock (1983–)

If you’ve seen Pose, the FX television show about 1980s New York ballroom culture, you’ve witnessed the ascendant work of trans icon, screenwriter, director, and journalist Janet Mock. Mock, a graduate of the NYU Journalism Masters program and former editor at People and Marie Claire, broke boundaries as the first out trans woman of color hired as a television writer for a major series. 
In 2014, she published her first memoir, Redefining Realness. In 2017, she released her second memoir, Surpassing Certainty. Mock’s memoirs provide not only a retrospective into her life in her twenties and in childhood, but insight into the work of a budding trans activist. In 2019, Mock became the first out trans woman of color to sign a Netflix production deal for a future TV series and potential feature film projects.

Malala Yousafzai (1997–)

Malala Yousafzai is the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 2014 for her activism for female education. The daughter of a teacher at a girls school in Pakistan, she wrote about the importance of girls’ education for BBC Urdu. The Taliban targeted her for this activism—in October 2012, a masked gunman shot her in the head on her school bus. But after she awoke ten days later in a hospital in Birmingham, England, she continued to advocate for girls’ education rights. She wrote her memoir, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. 
Her first book was soon followed by two children’s picture books entitled I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World and Malala’s Magic Pencil. Placing other refugees’ voices center stage became her goal with the story collection We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World, wherein Malala and nine other displaced girls spoke to their plight with candor and courage.