All this, of course, underscores the need for more waitresses and fewer literary lionesses involved in politics.

She is our very own and very special literary lioness, Mrs. Southworth!

Even as talented families go, the Mitford sisters are remarkable - the most brilliant pride of literary lionesses to have emerged in England since the Brontes, who also had little or no formal education.

It can be as blandly clean-scrubbed as those of the two otherworldly gangsters seen in "The Krays" or as dangerously pleasant as that of the smiling literary lioness played by Kathy Bates in "Misery," based in Stephen King's novel.

Visions of America's literary lionesses stepping up to the microphone danced in my head: Joyce Carol Oates crooning Cole Porter; Alice Munro singing Irving Berlin.

Baillie was a Scottish literary lioness who lived here with her older sister, Agnes, from 1762 to 1828 and was much visited by Keats, Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott.

It seems that this fiercest of literary lionesses lived a good deal of her life in a state of private dread.

"Crossing Delancey" includes several sharply edged supporting performances, with Rosemary Harris as a fully clawed literary lioness, Mr. Krabbe as the lazily seductive writer and Suzzy Roche, of the singing Roche sisters, adding a distinctly modern touch as Izzy's pragmatic, unattached friend.

The series would "chronicle the complicated relationship among three adult sisters, all writers sharing the same upper east side apartment building, and their mother, a domineering literary lioness who reserves most of her affections for their ne'er-do-well brother."

But, hey, the library implies, what's that to a literary lioness heading for the big time?