MARY Saunders, an intelligent, restless girl of 13, looks around her family's squalid rooms in a London cellar and thinks, "I deserve better than this." It's a thought that will doom her, for Mary has ...

First thought, upon finishing this retelling of the story of Mary Saunders, an 18th-century girl who was born on the wrong side of the tracks even before there were any tracks: thank God I wasn't born ...

Imagine a teenage girl forced to wear the same gray dress every day for a year. Now, imagine that girl walking down a dirty lane on a gray day in her gray dress and seeing a red, silk ribbon tied into ...

Irish writer Emma Donoghue describes the research and ideas that went into her book, Slammerkin, and reads a bit of the story. It's a novel based on the true story of a London servant girl who ...

Written in 2000 and handsomely reissued by Virago as part of a series of women's coming-of-age stories, Emma Donoghue's novel is an account of the nasty, brutish and short life of Mary Saunders, a ...

Embed <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/1135217/135217" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"> A poor ...