Download Free British Women Writers Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online British Women Writers and write the review.

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.
Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men—one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history. Looser investigates the careers of Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Austen and shows how each of their contributions to historical discourse differed greatly as a result of political, historical, religious, class, and generic affiliations. Adding their contributions to accounts of early modern writing refutes the assumption that historiography was an exclusive men's club and that fiction was the only prose genre open to women.
Essays tracing the evolving relationship between British women writers and the short story genre from the late Nineteenth Century to the present day.What is the relationship between the British woman writer and the short story? This collection examines what this versatile genre offers women writers, and what this can tell us about the society and culture they inhabit. From the rise of the modern printing press at the end of the Nineteenth Century through to the present digital age, these essays examine how the short story has been deployed and reworked by women writers and how they have influenced and shaped the genres development. Considering the effect of literary inheritances, societal and cultural change, and shifting publishing demands, this collection traces the evolution of the genre through to its continued appeal to women writing today. From the New Woman to contemporary feminisms, women's anthologies to microfiction, modernist writers to the contemporary works of Sarah Hall and Helen Simpson, the chapters in this collection investigate a crucial yet under-examined field of British literature.Key Features and Benefits12 chapters discussing a range of gender and genre issues since the fin-de-sic e to the present day.Sets out a clear trajectory to map both the historical and literary connections and divergences between British women short story writers. Offers a comprehensive account of the genres development to provide scholars with a unique insight into a largely neglected aspect of womens writing.Includes new readings of canonical authors alongside more recent theoretical approaches, innovations and lesser-discussed writers.
Catherine Clay's persuasively argued and rigorously documented study examines women's friendships during the period between the two world wars. Building on extensive new archival research, the book's organizing principle is a series of literary-historical case-studies that explore the practices, meanings and effects of friendship within a network of British women writers, who were all loosely connected to the feminist weekly periodical Time and Tide. Clay considers the letters and diaries, as well as fiction, poetry, autobiographies and journalistic writings, of authors such as Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison, and Stella Benson, to examine women's friendships in relation to two key contexts: the rise of the professional woman writer under the shadow of literary modernism and historic shifts in the cultural recognition of lesbianism crystallized by The Well of Loneliness trial in 1928. While Clay's study presents substantial evidence to support the crucial role close and enduring friendships played in women's professional achievements, it also boldly addresses the limitations and denials of these relationships. Producing 'biographies of friendship' untold in existing author studies, her book also challenges dominant accounts of women's friendships and advances new ways for thinking about women's friendship in contemporary debates.
In her study of newly recovered works by British women, Kathryn Freeman traces the literary relationship between women writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, otherwise known as the Orientalists. Distinct from their male counterparts of the Romantic period, who tended to mirror the Orientalist distortions of India, women writers like Phebe Gibbes, Elizabeth Hamilton, Sydney Owenson, Mariana Starke, Eliza Fay, Anna Jones, and Maria Jane Jewsbury interrogated these distortions from the foundation of gender. Freeman takes a three-pronged approach, arguing first that in spite of their marked differences, female authors shared a common resistance to the Orientalists’ intellectual genealogy that allowed them to represent Vedic non-dualism as an alternative subjectivity to the masculine model of European materialist philosophy. She also examines the relationship between gender and epistemology, showing that women’s texts not only shift authority to a feminized subjectivity, but also challenge the recurring Orientalist denigration of Hindu masculinity as effeminate. Finally, Freeman contrasts the shared concern about miscegenation between Orientalists and women writers, contending that the first group betrays anxiety about intermarriage between East Indian Company men and indigenous women while the varying portrayals of intermarriage by women show them poised to dissolve the racial and social boundaries. Her study invites us to rethink the Romantic paradigm of canonical writers as replicators of Orientalists’ cultural imperialism in favor of a more complicated stance that accommodates the differences between male and female authors with respect to India.
Original essays by American and British scholars offer a reader-friendly introduction to the work of Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and a dozen other British women writers British women in the second half of the 20th century have produced a body of work that is as diverse as it is entertaining. This book offers an informal, jargon-free introduction to the fiction of sixteen contemporary writers either brought up or now living in England, from Muriel Spark to Jeanette Winterson. British Women Writing Fiction presents a balanced view comprising women writing since the 1950s and 1960s, those who attracted critical attention during the 1970s and 1980s, and those who have burst upon the literary scene more recently, including African-Caribbean and African women. The essays show how all of these writers treat British subjects and themes, sometimes from radically different perspectives, and how those who are daughters of immigrants see themselves as women writing on the margins of society. Abby Werlock's introduction explores the historical and aesthetic factors that have contributed to the genre, showing how even those writers who began in a traditional vein have created experimental work. The contributors provide complete bibliographies of each writer's works and selected bibliographies of criticism. Exceptional both in its breadth of subjects covered and critical approaches taken, this book provides essential background that will enable readers to appreciate the singular merits of each writer. It offers an approach toward better understanding favorite authors and provides a way to become acquainted with new ones.
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.
This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1995
The historical novel has been one of the most important forms of women's reading and writing in the twentieth century, yet it has been consistently under-rated and critically neglected. In the first major study of British women writers' use of the genre, Diana Wallace tracks its development across the century. She combines a comprehensive survey with detailed readings of key writers, including Naomi Mitchison, Georgette Heyer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Margaret Irwin, Jean Plaidy, Mary Renault, Philippa Gregory and Pat Barker.