Following the success of their previous anthology Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, father-son editorial team Anthony and Ben Holden set out to compile a sister volume. Poems That Make Grown Women Cry surveys 100 women, from Annie Lennox to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, about the verses that move them to tears. Below, five writers explain their choices:
Kate Atkinson on Edward Thomas’s “Adelstrop”
Margaret Drabble on Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Say not the struggle naught availeth”
Siri Hustvedt on Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes–”
Helen Macdonald on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”
A.L. Kennedy on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese: XXVIII”