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This broad examination of women writers identified with Great Britain builds on its predecessor's strengths, with fifty percent new material as well as completely updated entries. Over 600 writers are discussed in terms of their biographies, with precise details where these could be ascertained and in some cases correcting biographies in other reference works, as well as thematic issues and critical reception. Each entry includes a definitive bibliography of primary works and thorough secondary bibliographies (including book-length studies, reference works, major essays and reviews) to lead readers to other sources. Available in paperback for the first time, this book is an ideal desk reference for scholar and student alike.
Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe addresses the central question of the professionalization of women’s writing before the eighteenth-century from a comparatist perspective, offering intriguing case studies on as yet an underdeveloped area in early modern studies.
British Women Writers and the French Revolution provides an overview of a wide range of British women's writings on the French Revolution, from writers sympathetic to the Revolution like Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, and Charlotte Smith, to anti-revolutionary writers like Hannah More and Jane West. Based on new research in French and British archives and libraries, the book uncovers little-known writings by British women, and argues that these writers developed a distinct antinationalism, in some cases even a feminist cosmopolitanism, in their responses to the European revolutionary crisis.
The essays collected in this volume include a selection of those presented at a conference in the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain, in 2002. They highlight the existence of a European network of women's writing which became a valuable source of consciousness-raising, not only for European women writers, but also for their readers. The main theme running through the essays is love: women loving against the odds and transcending all kinds of obstacles. Does love speak a common language or is it inevitably linked to social mores and individual experience? Does desire work in the same way? Do love and desire have the power to subvert dichotomous thinking and motivate real change? The texts studied in this volume are both fictional and factual, from plays and novels to diaries, letters and drama performances. The countries the essays travel through, and the languages they encounter, all contribute to forming a magic web of connections, solidarities and ideas that truly cross boundaries.
This highly original synthesis is a clear and stimulating assessment of nineteenth-century British women. It aims to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the key historiographical debates and issues, placing particular emphasis upon recent, revisionist research. The book highlights not merely the ideologies and economic circumstances which shaped women's lives, but highlights the sheer diversity of women's own experiences and identities. In so doing, it presents a positive but nuanced interpretation of women's roles within their own families and communities, as well as stressing women's enormous contribution to the making of contemporary British culture and society.
Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760-1830 argues that British women’s history and historical fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century changed not only the shape but also the political significance of women's writing. As history writing in general became more literary and characterized by sentiment in the late eighteenth century, these authors pushed the limits of narrated history to carve out a space for women writers to respond to contemporary national politics, thereby enabling them to participate in civic life in new and sometimes subversive ways. This study examines historical and literary genres, historiography during the period, and the gendering of civic and literary roles.
In British Women Writers of World War II , Phyllis Lassner offers a challenging analysis of politicized literature in which such British women writers as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith and Storm Jameson debated the `justness' of World War II. Lassner questions prevailing approaches to women's war writing by exploring the complex range of pacifist and activist literary forms of women who redefined such pieties as patriotism and duty and heroism and victimization.
This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century. Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser finds that far from fading into moribund old age, female literary greats such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Porter toiled for decades after they achieved acclaim -- despite seemingly concerted attempts by literary gatekeepers to marginalize their later contributions. Though these remarkable women wrote and published well into old age, Looser sees in their late careers the necessity of choosing among several different paths. These included receding into the background as authors of "classics," adapting to grandmotherly standards of behavior, attempting to reshape masculinized conceptions of aged wisdom, or trying to create entirely new categories for older women writers. In assessing how these writers affected and were affected by the culture in which they lived, and in examining their varied reactions to the prospect of aging, Looser constructs careful portraits of each of her Subjects and explains why many turned toward retrospection in their later works. In illuminating the powerful and often poorly recognized legacy of the British women writers who spurred a marketplace revolution in their earlier years only to find unanticipated barriers to acceptance in later life, Looser opens up new scholarly territory in the burgeoning field of feminist age studies.
