In 1976, Alice Walker described the moment when she first encountered the writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Situating Hurston as one of many “belatedly discovered models” for her own artistic practice, Walker explained the immense joy of finding a Black woman writer whose experiences mirrored her own. But Walker’s delayed path to Hurston also inspired a mandate for her creative work: “I write not only what I want to read—understanding fully and indelibly that if I don’t do it no one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to my satisfaction—I write all the things I should have been able to read.”1

Forty-five years later, the mechanisms of erasure that kept Hurston from Walker continue to prevent women from accessing their own histories. Tanya Pearson is acutely aware of this struggle, and in her first monograph, Why Marianne Faithfull Matters, Pearson writes the book...

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