A Literature of Their Own : British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing - Softcover

Showalter, Elaine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0860682854 ISBN 13: 9780860682851

Publisher: Virago Press Ltd, 1982

Synopsis

When first published in 1982 A Literature of their Own quickly set the stage for the creative explosion of feminist literary studies that transformed the field in the 1980s. Launching a major new area for literary investigation, the book uncovered the long but neglected tradition of women writers and the development of their fiction from the 1800s onwards. It includes assessments of famous writers such as the Brontes, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing, but also presents critical appraisals of Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and Sarah Grand - to name but a few of those prolific and successful Victorian novelists - once household names, now largely forgotten. This revised and expanded edition contains a new introductory chapter surveying the book's reception as well as a postscript chapter celebrating the legacy of feminism and feminist criticism in the efflorescence of contemporary British fiction by women.

About this title

Review:

Readers of this new, enlarged edition of the classic feminist study of British women novelists will find themselves delighted by Elaine Showalter's astute and acerbic critical intelligence. Showalter is one of the few scholars who can make her readers rush to their bookshelves to refute her point, or simply to experience again Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, or the bitterly illuminating stories of Katherine Mansfield. Her chief innovation is to place the works of famous women writers beside those of the minor or forgotten, building a continuity of influence and inspiration as well as a more complete picture of the social conditions in which women's books have been produced. She has added a new introduction recounting, with justifiable pleasure, how daring and controversial her study seemed when it first appeared in 1977 (and how many enemies it made her). In an afterword, she touches on more recent developments in the women's novel in Britain, including the influence of the dazzling Angela Carter. --Regina Marler

About the Author:

Elaine Showalter is Avalon Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University. She has written and edited many books.

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago Press Ltd
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0860682854
• ISBN 13: 9780860682851
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 378