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

by Elaine Showalter

Overview

When first published in 1977, 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 in England. A classic of feminist criticism, its impact continues to be felt today.


This revised and expanded edition contains a new introductory chapter surveying the book's reception and a new postscript chapter celebrating the legacy of feminism and feminist criticism in the efflorescence of contemporary British fiction by women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691221960
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	12/08/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Elaine Showalter is Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University. She has written and edited many books, including The Female Malady: Women, Madness and Society 1830-1980, Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing, Scribbling Women: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century Women, and Hystories. She is currently working on a study of feminist intellectuals.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments to the Expanded Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Twenty Years On: A Literature of Their Own Revisited
I	The Female Tradition	3
II	The Feminine Novelists and the Will to Write	37
III	The Double Critical Standard and the Feminine Novel	73
IV	Feminine Heroines: Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot	100
V	Feminine Heroes: The Woman's Man	133
VI	Subverting the Feminine Novel: Sensationalism and Feminine Protest	153
VII	The Feminist Novelists	182
VIII	Women Writers and the Suffrage Movement	216
IX	The Female Aesthetic	240
X	Virginia Woolf and the Flight into Androgyny	263
XI	Beyond the Female Aesthetic: Contemporary Women Novelists	298
XII	Laughing Medusa	320
Index	337

What People are Saying About This

John Goode

This book is absolutely and immediately essential reading.... It will remain for a very long time a book to refer to again and again for both information and ideas.

Patricia Meyer Spacks

A Literature of Their Own places the women novelists everyone has heard of ... in a new setting, considering them in relation to their relatively unknown female contemporaries. The resulting shift of perspective generates fresh social and literary understanding.

Editorial Reviews

Ought to be required reading for anyone who cares about women or the history of the novel. [This book] is a rare thing: a book of literary criticism that illuminates our lives. —The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Erica Jong

"A Literature of Their Own places the women novelists everyone has heard of ... in a new setting, considering them in relation to their relatively unknown female contemporaries. The resulting shift of perspective generates fresh social and literary understanding."—-Patricia Meyer Spacks, The New York Times Book Review

"Ought to be required reading for anyone who cares about women or the history of the novel. [This book] is a rare thing: a book of literary criticism that illuminates our lives."—-Erica Jong, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"This book is absolutely and immediately essential reading.... It will remain for a very long time a book to refer to again and again for both information and ideas."—-John Goode, The Times Higher Education Supplement

From the Publisher

This book is absolutely and immediately essential reading.... It will remain for a very long time a book to refer to again and again for both information and ideas.

The Times Higher Education Supplement - John Goode

Ought to be required reading for anyone who cares about women or the history of the novel. [This book] is a rare thing: a book of literary criticism that illuminates our lives.

The Los Angeles Times Book Review - Erica Jong

A Literature of Their Own places the women novelists everyone has heard of ... in a new setting, considering them in relation to their relatively unknown female contemporaries. The resulting shift of perspective generates fresh social and literary understanding.

The New York Times Book Review - Patricia Meyer Spacks

This book is absolutely and immediately essential reading.... It will remain for a very long time a book to refer to again and again for both information and ideas.
— John Goode

The Times Higher Education Supplement

Ought to be required reading for anyone who cares about women or the history of the novel. [This book] is a rare thing: a book of literary criticism that illuminates our lives.
— Erica Jong

The Los Angeles Times Book Review

A Literature of Their Own places the women novelists everyone has heard of ... in a new setting, considering them in relation to their relatively unknown female contemporaries. The resulting shift of perspective generates fresh social and literary understanding.
— Patricia Meyer Spacks

The New York Times Book Review