Women's writing as a discrete area of literary studies

Literary criticism

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...

 is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their gender, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study. "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her gender

Gender

Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...

: her position as a woman within the literary marketplace. Women's writing, as a discrete area of literary studies and practice, is recognized explicitly by the numbers of dedicated journals, organizations, awards, and conferences

Academic conference

An academic conference or symposium is a conference for researchers to present and discuss their work. Together with academic or scientific journals, conferences provide an important channel for exchange of information between researchers.-Overview:Conferences are usually composed of various...

 which focus mainly or exclusively on texts produced by women. The majority of English literature programmes offer courses on specific aspects of literature by women, and women's writing is generally considered an area of specialization in its own right.

The exemplary tradition

The idea of discussing women's cultural contributions as a separate category has a long history. Lists of exemplary

Exemplum

An exemplum is a moral anecdote, brief or extended, real or fictitious, used to illustrate a point.-Exemplary literature:...

 women can be found as far back as the 8th century BC

8th century BC

The 8th century BC started the first day of 800 BC and ended the last day of 701 BC.-Overview:The 8th century BC was a period of great changes in civilizations. In Egypt, the 23rd and 24th dynasties led to rule from Nubia in the 25th Dynasty...

, when Hesiod

Hesiod

Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...

 compiled Catalogue of Women

Catalogue of Women

thumb|275px|[[Guido Reni]]'s first Atalanta e Ippomene , depicting the race of [[Atalanta]], a myth which was known to Reni from [[Ovid]]'s [[Metamorphoses]], but is now also represented by several fragments of the Catalogue of Women.The Catalogue of Women —also known as...

(attr.), a list of heroines and goddesses. Plutarch

Plutarch

Plutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...

 listed heroic and artistic women in his Moralia

Moralia

The Moralia of the 1st-century Greek scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea is an eclectic collection of 78 essays and transcribed speeches. They give an insight into Roman and Greek life, but often are also fascinating timeless observations in their own right...

. In the medieval period, Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...

 used mythic and biblical women as moral exemplars in De mulieribus claris

De mulieribus claris

De mulieribus claris is a collection of biographies of historical and mythological women by the Florentine author Giovanni Boccaccio, first published in 1374. It is notable as the first collection devoted exclusively to biographies of women in Western literature...

(On Famous Women) (1361–1375), directly inspiring Christine de Pisan to write The Book of the City of Ladies

The Book of the City of Ladies

thumb|400px|right|Picture from The Book of the City of LadiesThe Book of the City of Ladies , or Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, is perhaps Christine de Pizan's most famous literary work, and it is her second work of lengthy prose. Pizan uses the vernacular French language to compose the book, but...

(1405). British writers, as in so many other instances, embraced the classical models

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...

 and made them their own. Some of the British catalogues were moral in tone but others focused on accomplishments as well as virtues. There are many examples in the 18th century of exemplary catalogues of women writers, including George Ballard

George Ballard

George Ballard was an English antiquary and biographer, the author of Memoirs of British Ladies .Ballard was born at Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire. Self-educated, Ballard taught himself Saxon while working in a habit-maker's shop, and attracted the attention of the Saxon scholar Elizabeth Elstob...

's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences (1752), John Duncombe

John Duncombe

Sir John Duncombe was an English politician.John Duncombe was the son of William Duncombe. He was educated at Eton College and St John's College, Cambridge. He was knighted in 1646. Duncombe was Member of Parliament for Bury St Edmunds from 1660 to 1678, and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 22...

's Feminiad, a catalogue of women writers, and the Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments. And as long as there has been this laudatory trend there has been a counter-trend of misogynist

Misogyny

Misogyny is the hatred or dislike of women or girls. Philogyny, meaning fondness, love or admiration towards women, is the antonym of misogyny. The term misandry is the term for men that is parallel to misogyny...

 writings, perhaps exemplified by Richard Polwhele

Richard Polwhele

Richard Polwhele was a Cornish clergyman, poet and topographer.-Biography:Born at Truro, Cornwall, Polwhele met literary luminaries Catharine Macaulay and Hannah More at an early age. He was educated at Truro Grammar School, where he precociously published The Fate of Llewellyn...

's The Unsex'd Females

The Unsex'd Females

The Unsex'd Females, a Poem , by Richard Polwhele, is a polemical intervention into the public debates over the role of women at the end of the 18th century. The poem is primarily concerned with what Polwhele characterizes as the encroachment of radical French political and philosophical ideas into...

, a critique in verse of women writers at the end of the 18th century with a particular focus on Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...

 and her circle.

Women writers themselves have long been interested in tracing a "woman's tradition" in writing. Mary Scott

Mary Scott (poet)

Mary Scott , poet, was born in Somerset, England.Scott's father was a linen draper. Not much else is known about her life before the publication of The Female Advocate, dedicated to her friend Anne Steele, in 1774...

's The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe's Feminead (1774) is one of the best known such works in the 18th century, a period that saw a burgeoning of women's publishing. In 1803, Mary Hays

Mary Hays

Mary Hays was an English novelist and feminist.- Early years :Mary Hays was born in Southwark, London on Oct. 13, 1759. Almost nothing is known of her first 17 years. In 1779 she fell in love with John Eccles who lived on Gainsford Street, where she also lived. Their parents opposed the match but...

 published the six volume Female Biography. Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

's A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928...

(1929) exemplifies the impulse in the modern period to explore a tradition of women's writing. Woolf, however, sought to explain what she perceived as an absence; by the mid-century scholarly attention turned to finding and reclaiming "lost" writers. And there were many to reclaim: it is common for the editors of dictionaries or anthologies of women's writing to refer to the difficulty in choosing from all the available material.

Currently

Women's writing came to exist as a separate category of scholarly interest relatively recently. In the West, the second wave

Second-wave feminism

The Feminist Movement, or the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States refers to a period of feminist activity which began during the early 1960s and lasted through the early 1990s....

 of feminism

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

 prompted a general reevaluation of women's historical contributions, and various academic sub-disciplines, such as women's history

Women's history

Women's history is the study of the role that women have played in history, together with the methods needed to study women. It includes the study of the history of the growth of woman's rights throughout recorded history, the examination of individual women of historical significance, and the...

 and women's writing, developed in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. Virginia Blain et al. characterize the growth in interest since 1970 in women's writing as "powerful". Much of this early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Studies like Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking in their insistence that women have always been writing. Commensurate with this growth in scholarly interest, various presses began the task of reissuing long-out-of-print texts. Virago Press began to publish its large list of 19th and early-20th-century novels in 1975 and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation. In the 1980s Pandora Press, responsible for publishing Spender's study, issued a companion line of 18th-century novels by written by women. More recently, Broadview Press continues to issue 18th- and 19th-century novels, many hitherto out of print, and the University of Kentucky has a series of republications of early women's novels. There has been commensurate growth in the area of biographical dictionaries of women writers due to a perception, according to one editor, that "[m]ost of our women are not represented in the 'standard' reference books in the field.".

Trade publishers have similarly focused on women's writing: since the 1970s there have been a number of literary periodicals

Literary magazine

A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters...

 such as Fireweed and Room of One's Own

Room of One's Own

Room is a Canadian quarterly literary journal founded to showcase the work of established and emerging Canadian women writers and visual artists. Launched in Vancouver in 1975 by the West Coast Feminist Literary Magazine Publishing Society, the journal has always been operated by an all-volunteer...

which are dedicated to publishing the creative work of women writers. There are a number of dedicated presses, such as the Second Story Press and the Women's Press. In addition, collections and anthologies of women's writing continue to be published by both trade and academic presses

Academic publishing

Academic publishing describes the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in journal article, book or thesis form. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted is often called...

.

The widespread interest in women's writing developed alongside, influenced, and was influenced by, a general reassessment and expansion of the literary canon. Interest in post-colonial literature

Post-colonial literature

Postcolonial literature , is a body of literary writings that reacts to the discourse of colonization. Post-colonial literature often involves writings that deal with issues of de-colonization or the political and cultural independence of people formerly subjugated to colonial rule...

s, gay and lesbian literature

LGBT literature

Gay literature is a collective term for literature produced by or for the LGBT community, or which involves characters, plot lines or themes portraying male homosexual behavior.-Subgenres:...

, writing by people of colour, working people's writing, and the cultural productions of other historically marginalized groups has resulted in a whole scale expansion of what is considered "literature," and genres hitherto not regarded as "literary," such as children's writing, journals, letters, travel writing, and many others are now the subjects of scholarly interest. Most genres and sub-genres

Literary genre

A literary genre is a category of literary composition. Genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or even length. Genre should not be confused with age category, by which literature may be classified as either adult, young-adult, or children's. They also must not be confused...

 have undergone a similar analysis, so that one now sees work on the "female gothic" or women's science fiction, for example.

The question of whether or not there is a "women's tradition" remains vexed; some scholars and editors refer to a "women's canon" and women's "literary lineage," and seek to "identify the recurring themes and to trace the evolutionary and interconnecting patterns" in women's writing, but the range of women's writing across time and place is so considerable that, according to some, it is inaccurate to speak of "women's writing" in a universal sense: Claire Buck calls "women's writing" an "unstable category." Further, women writers cannot be considered apart from their male contemporaries and the larger literary tradition. Recent scholarship on race, class, and sexuality in literature further complicate the issue and militate against the impulse to posit one "women's tradition." Some scholars maintain a commonality, however: editors Virginia Blain et al. argue that "the inter-nationality of the entries" in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English "confirms our sense both of a common literary inheritance differently managed in its several locations and of a tradition in women's writing based on common experience and spanning geographical and cultural boundaries." More cautiously, Roger Lonsdale allows that "it is not unreasonable to consider" women writers "in some aspects as a special case, given their educational insecurities and the constricted notions of the properly 'feminine' in social and literary behaviour they faced.". Using the term "women's writing" implies, then, the belief that women in some sense constitute a group, however diverse, who share a position of difference based on gender. Blain et al. lay out their determination to include "not only English women, but women writing in English in several national traditions, including African, American, Asian, Australian, Canadian, Caribbean, New Zealand, South Pacific, the British Isles." This approach implies that although gender dynamics vary from time and place, the dynamic of difference itself is persistent, and further, that those differences present opportunities for fruitful inquiry.

The "exemplary women" tradition

• Hesiod
  Hesiod
  Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and...
  
  , Catalogue of Women
  Catalogue of Women
  thumb|275px|[[Guido Reni]]'s first Atalanta e Ippomene , depicting the race of [[Atalanta]], a myth which was known to Reni from [[Ovid]]'s [[Metamorphoses]], but is now also represented by several fragments of the Catalogue of Women.The Catalogue of Women —also known as...
  
  (attr.)
• Plutarch
  Plutarch
  Plutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...
  
  , in Moralia
  Moralia
  The Moralia of the 1st-century Greek scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea is an eclectic collection of 78 essays and transcribed speeches. They give an insight into Roman and Greek life, but often are also fascinating timeless observations in their own right...
  
  
• Boccaccio
  Giovanni Boccaccio
  Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...
  
  , De mulieribus claris
  De mulieribus claris
  De mulieribus claris is a collection of biographies of historical and mythological women by the Florentine author Giovanni Boccaccio, first published in 1374. It is notable as the first collection devoted exclusively to biographies of women in Western literature...
  
  (On Famous Women) (1361–1375)
• Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies
  The Book of the City of Ladies
  thumb|400px|right|Picture from The Book of the City of LadiesThe Book of the City of Ladies , or Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, is perhaps Christine de Pizan's most famous literary work, and it is her second work of lengthy prose. Pizan uses the vernacular French language to compose the book, but...
  
  (1405)
• Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of hooly wummen (c.1430)
• George Ballard
  George Ballard
  George Ballard was an English antiquary and biographer, the author of Memoirs of British Ladies .Ballard was born at Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire. Self-educated, Ballard taught himself Saxon while working in a habit-maker's shop, and attracted the attention of the Saxon scholar Elizabeth Elstob...
  
  , Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences. Oxford: W. Jackson, 1752.
• John Duncombe
  John Duncombe (writer)
  John Duncombe was an English clergyman and writer, son of William Duncombe.He studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow. He married the poet Susanna Highmore...
  
  , Feminead (1754)
• Anon., Biographium faemineum : the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments. London: Printed for S. Crowder, 1766. 2 vols.
• Mary Scott
  Mary Scott (poet)
  Mary Scott , poet, was born in Somerset, England.Scott's father was a linen draper. Not much else is known about her life before the publication of The Female Advocate, dedicated to her friend Anne Steele, in 1774...
  
  , The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe's Feminead. London: Joseph Johnson, 1774.
• Mary Hays
  Mary Hays
  Mary Hays was an English novelist and feminist.- Early years :Mary Hays was born in Southwark, London on Oct. 13, 1759. Almost nothing is known of her first 17 years. In 1779 she fell in love with John Eccles who lived on Gainsford Street, where she also lived. Their parents opposed the match but...
  
  , Female Biography (6 vols., 1803)
• Sarah Josepha Hale
  Sarah Josepha Hale
  Sarah Josepha Buell Hale was an American writer and an influential editor. She is the author of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb"...
  
  , Woman's Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished women from the Creation to AD 1850 (1854)
• Charlotte Mary Yonge
  Charlotte Mary Yonge
  Charlotte Mary Yonge , was an English novelist, known for her huge output, now mostly out of print.- Life :Charlotte Mary Yonge was born in Otterbourne, Hampshire, England, on 11 August 1823 to William Yonge and Fanny Yonge, née Bargus. She was educated at home by her father, studying Latin, Greek,...
  
  , Biographies of Good Women (First Series, 1862; Second Series, 1865)
• Julia Kavanagh
  Julia Kavanagh
  Julia Kavanagh was an Irish novelist, born at Thurles in Tipperary, Ireland.-Biography:She was the daughter of Morgan Peter Kavanagh , author of various philological works and some poems...
  
  , Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century (1850), Women of Christianity (1852), French Women of Letters (1862) and English Women of Letters (1862). These collective biographies "all argue against idealized, sentimental portrayals of female experience. She intended these biographies to provide a corrective to the silence of male historians on the topic of female influence in a variety of sphere beyond the domestic" (ODNB).
• Helen C. Black, Notable Women Authors of the Day: Biographical Sketches. Glasgow: David Bryce & Son, 1893.
  • "These sketches originally appeared as a series in the 'Lady's pictorial'... They are now revised, enlarged and brought up to date." Sketches of Mrs. Lynn Linton
    Eliza Lynn Linton
    Eliza Lynn Linton , was a British novelist, essayist, and journalist.-Life:The daughter of a clergyman and granddaughter of a bishop of Carlisle, she arrived in London in 1845 as the protégé of poet Walter Savage Landor. In the following year she produced her first novel, Azeth, the Egyptian;...
    
    , Mrs. Riddell, Mrs. L. B. Walford
    Lucy Bethia Walford
    Mrs. Lucy Bethia Walford was a Scottish author who wrote 45 books, the majority of them "light-hearted domestic comedies." -Life and work:...
    
    , Rhoda Broughton
    Rhoda Broughton
    Rhoda Broughton was a novelist.-Life:Rhoda Broughton was born in Denbigh in North Wales on 29 November 1840. She was the daughter of the Rev. Delves Broughton youngest son of the Rev. Sir Henry Delves-Broughton, 8th baronet. She developed a taste for literature, especially poetry, as a young girl...
    
    , John Strange Winter
    John Strange Winter
    John Strange Winter was the pen-name of Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Stannard , an English novelist.She was the daughter of Reverent H. V. Palmer, rector of St Margarets, York. She early began to write fiction for different magazines, producing sentimental stories, chiefly of army life...
    
     (Mrs. Arthur Stannard), Mrs. Alexander, Helen Mathers, Florence Marryat
    Florence Marryat
    Florence Marryat was a British author and actress. The daughter of author Capt. Frederick Marryat and his wife Catherine, she was particularly known for her sensational novels and her involvement with several celebrated spiritual mediums of the late nineteenth century...
    
    , Mrs. Lovett Cameron, Mrs. Hungerford
    Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
    Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, née Hamilton, , was an Irish novelist whose light romantic fiction was popular throughout the English-speaking world in the late 19th century.-Biography:...
    
    , Matilda Betham Edwards, Edna Lyall, Rosa Nouchette Carey
    Rosa Nouchette Carey
    Rosa Nouchette Carey was an English children's novelist.-Life:Born in Stratford-le-Bow, Rosa was the sixth of the seven children of William Henry Carey , shipbroker, and his wife, Maria Jane , daughter of Edward J. Wooddill. She was brought up in London at Tryons Road, Hackney, Middlesex and in...
    
    , Adeline Sergeant, Mrs. Edward Kennard, Jessie Fothergill, Lady Duffus Hardy, Iza Duffus Hardy, May Crommelin
    May Crommelin
    Maria Henrietta de la Cherois Crommelin, known as May de la Cherois Crommelin, was a novelist and travel writer born in Ulster, Ireland at Carrowdore Castle in County Down....
    
    , Mrs. Houstoun, Mrs. Alex. Fraser, Honourable Mrs. Henry Chetwynd, Jean Middlemass, Augusta De Grasse Stevens, Mrs. Leith Adams, Jean Ingelow
    Jean Ingelow
    Jean Ingelow , was an English poet and novelist.- Early life and education :Born at Boston, Lincolnshire, she was the daughter of William Ingelow, a banker...
    
    .

Resources

• Abel, Elizabeth, Writing and Sexual Difference. University of Chicago Press, 1982.
• Allison, Dorothy
  Dorothy Allison
  Dorothy Allison is an American writer, speaker, and member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.-Early life:Dorothy E. Allison was born on April 11, 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina to Ruth Gibson Allison, who was fifteen at the time. Ruth was a poor and unmarried mother who worked as a...
  
  . Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. New York: Firebrand Books, 1994.
• Ayres, Brenda, Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers. Westport, CT: Praeger Pub, 2003.
• Backscheider, Paula R., and John Richetti, eds. Popular Fiction by Women, 1660-1730. Oxford: OUP, 1996.
• Eagleton, Mary, ed., Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
• Fetterley, Judith
  Judith Fetterley
  Judith Fetterley is a literary scholar known for her work in feminism and women's studies. She was influential in leading a reappraisal of women's literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the contributions of women writing about women's experience, including their perspectives on men in the...
  
  , The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Indiana University Press, 1978.
• Figes, Eva
  Eva Figes
  Eva Figes is an English author.Figes has written novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. She arrived in Britain in 1939 with her parents and a younger brother...
  
  ,Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1850. The Macmillan Press, 1982.
• Ferguson, Mary Anne, [compiler]. Images of Women in Literature, 3rd Edition, Houghton-Mifflin Co. 1981. ISBN 0-395-29113-5
• Gilbert, Sandra M.
  Sandra Gilbert
  Sandra M. Gilbert , Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis, is an influential literary critic and poet who has published widely in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism...
  
  , and Susan Gubar
  Susan Gubar
  Dr. Susan D. Gubar is an American academic and Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies at Indiana University. She is co-author with Dr. Sandra M. Gilbert of the standard feminist text, The Madwoman in the Attic and a trilogy on women's writing in the twentieth century.Her book...
  
  , The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-300-08458-7
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. London: Virago Press, 1989.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. 2 Vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds., Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
  Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
  The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, published by W. W. Norton & Company, is one of the Norton Anthology series for use in English literary studies. It is edited by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar...
  
  .
• Greer, Germaine
  Germaine Greer
  Germaine Greer is an Australian writer, academic, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century....
  
  , et al., eds. Kissing the Rod: an anthology of seventeenth-century women's verse. Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1988.
• Hobby, Elaine, Virtue of Necessity: English women's writing 1649-1688. London: Virago Press, 1988. ISBN 0-86068-831-3
• Lonsdale, Roger ed. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
• Moi, Toril
  Toril Moi
  Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University. Previously she held positions as a lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and as Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Bergen, Norway...
  
  , Sexual/ Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1987. ISBN 0-415-02974-0; ISBN 0-415-28012-5 (second edition).
• Robertson, Fiona, ed. Women's Writing, 1778-1838. Oxford: OUP, 2001.
• Russ, Joanna
  Joanna Russ
  Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny...
  
  . How to Suppress Women's Writing. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1983.
• spender, dale
  Dale Spender
  Dale Spender is an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, writer and consultant.-Early life:Spender was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, a niece of the crime writer Jean Spender . The eldest of three, she has a younger sister Lynne, and a much younger brother Graeme. She attended the Burwood...
  
  , Mothers of the Novel: 100 good women writers before Jane Austen. London and New York: Pandora, 1986. ISBN 0863580815
• Showalter, Elaine
  Elaine Showalter
  Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.She is well known and respected in both academic and popular...
  
  , A Literature of their own: from Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing. London: Virago Press, 1977.
• Spacks, Patricia Meyer, The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of women's writing. George Allen and Unwin, 1976.
• Spencer, Jane, The Rise of the Woman Novelist. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. ISBN 0-631-13916-8
• Todd, Janet
  Janet Todd
  Janet Margaret Todd is a Welsh-born academic and a well-respected author of many books on women in literature. Todd was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Florida, where she undertook a doctorate on the poet John Clare...
  
  , Feminist Literary History: A Defence. Cambridge: Polity Press / Basil Blackwell, 1988.
• Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angellica: women, writing and fiction, 1660-1800. London: Virago Press, 1989. ISBN 0-86068-576-4

Series of republications

• Feminist Press: New York-based press which began reprinting books by American women in 1972
• Persephone Books
  Persephone Books
  Persephone Books is an independent publisher based in Bloomsbury, London. Founded in 1999 by Nicola Beauman, Persephone has a catalogue of 93 "neglected novels, diaries, poetry, short stories, non-fiction, biography and cookery books, mostly by women and mostly dating from the early to...
  
   : London-based press which "reprints forgotten classics by twentieth-century (mostly women) writers. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and who would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial."
• Virago Press
  Virago Press
  Virago is a British publishing company founded in 1973 by Carmen Callil to publish books by women writers. Both new works and reissued books by neglected authors have featured on the imprint's list....
  
   since 1975 has republished over 500 post-1800 classics of women's literature (see their list and their timeline) in their series Virago Modern Classics.
• Pandora Press "Mothers of the Novel" series:
  • Mary Brunton
    Mary Brunton
    Mary Brunton was a Scottish novelist.-Life:Mary was the daughter of Colonel Thomas Balfour of Elwick, a British Army officer and Frances Ligonier, daughter of Colonel Francis Ligonier and sister of the second earl of Ligonier. She was born on 1 November 1778 on Burray in the Orkney Islands...
    
    , Discipline. Orig. pub. 1815. 1986. ISBN 0863581056
  • Mary Brunton
    Mary Brunton
    Mary Brunton was a Scottish novelist.-Life:Mary was the daughter of Colonel Thomas Balfour of Elwick, a British Army officer and Frances Ligonier, daughter of Colonel Francis Ligonier and sister of the second earl of Ligonier. She was born on 1 November 1778 on Burray in the Orkney Islands...
    
    , Self-control. Orig. pub. 1810/11. 1986. ISBN 086358084X
  • Maria Edgeworth
    Maria Edgeworth
    Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe...
    
    , Belinda. Orig. pub. 1801. 1986. ISBN 0863580742
  • Maria Edgeworth
    Maria Edgeworth
    Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe...
    
    , Helen. Orig. pub. 1834. 1987. ISBN 0863581048
  • Maria Edgeworth
    Maria Edgeworth
    Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe...
    
    , Patronage. Orig. pub. 1814. 1986. ISBN 0863581064
  • Eliza Fenwick
    Eliza Fenwick
    Eliza Fenwick was an English author whose works include, Secresy; or The Ruin on the Rock , as well as several children's books....
    
    , Secrecy, or The Ruin of the Rock. Orig. pub. 1795. 1988. ISBN 0863583075
  • Sarah Fielding
    Sarah Fielding
    Sarah Fielding was a British author and sister of the novelist Henry Fielding. She was the author of The Governess, or The Little Female Academy , which was the first novel in English written especially for children , and had earlier achieved success with her novel The Adventures of David Simple...
    
    , The Governess, or The Little Female Academy
    The Governess, or The Little Female Academy
    The Governess, or The Little Female Academy by Sarah Fielding is the first full-length novel written for children, and a significant work of children's literature of the 18th century.In her preface, the author says:-Bibliography:...
    
    . Orig. pub. 1749. 1987. ISBN 086358182X
  • Mary Hamilton, Munster Village. Orig. pub. 1778. 1987. ISBN 0863581331
  • Mary Hays
    Mary Hays
    Mary Hays was an English novelist and feminist.- Early years :Mary Hays was born in Southwark, London on Oct. 13, 1759. Almost nothing is known of her first 17 years. In 1779 she fell in love with John Eccles who lived on Gainsford Street, where she also lived. Their parents opposed the match but...
    
    , The Memoirs of Emma Courtney. Orig. pub. 1796. 1987. ISBN 0863581323
  • Eliza Haywood
    Eliza Haywood
    Eliza Haywood , born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood’s literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest...
    
    , The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Orig. pub. 1751. 1986. ISBN 0863580904
  • Elizabeth Inchbald
    Elizabeth Inchbald
    Elizabeth Inchbald was an English novelist, actress, and dramatist.- Life :Born on 15 October 1753 at Standingfield, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, Elizabeth was the eighth of the nine children of John Simpson , a farmer, and his wife Mary, née Rushbrook. The family, like several others in the...
    
    , A Simple Story. Orig. pub. 1791. 1987. ISBN 0863581366
  • Charlotte Lennox
    Charlotte Lennox
    Charlotte Lennox was an English author and poet. She is most famous now as the author of The Female Quixote and for her association with Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, and Samuel Richardson, but she had a long career and wrote poetry, prose, and drama.-Life:Charlotte Lennox was born in Gibraltar...
    
    , The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella. Orig. pub. 1752. 1986. ISBN 0863580807
  • Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl
    The Wild Irish Girl
    The Wild Irish Girl; a National Tale is an epistolary novel written by Irish novelist Sydney Owenson in 1806.-Plot:The Hon. Horatio M———, son of the Earl of M———, is banished to his father's estate on the northwest coast of Connacht as punishment for accumulating large debts...
    
    . Orig. pub. 1806. 1986. ISBN 0863580971
  • Amelia Opie
    Amelia Opie
    Amelia Opie, née Alderson , was an English author who published numerous novels in the Romantic Period of the early 19th century, through 1828.-Life and work:...
    
    , Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter. Orig. pub. 1804. 1986. ISBN 0863580858
  • Frances Sheridan
    Frances Sheridan
    Frances Sheridan was an Anglo-Irish novelist and playwright.Frances Sheridan was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her father, Dr. Phillip Chamberlaine, was an Anglican minister. In 1747 she married Thomas Sheridan, who was then an actor and theatre director, and at the same time she began work on her...
    
    , Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. Orig. pub. 1761. 1987. ISBN 086358134X
  • Charlotte Turner Smith
    Charlotte Turner Smith
    Charlotte Turner Smith was an English Romantic poet and novelist. She initiated a revival of the English sonnet, helped establish the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels of sensibility....
    
    , The Old Manor House. Orig. pub. 1793. 1987. ISBN 0863581358
• American Women Writers Series, Rutgers University Press
• Broadview Press republish modern editions of classic works of literature as Broadview Editions (listed alphabetically by title and chronologically): a high proportion are works by women writers
• University of Kentucky series of Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women
• Oxford University Press
  Oxford University Press
  Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
  
  . The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
  Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
  Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and...
  
  . 30 vols, Oxford University Press, 1988. A 10-volume Supplement was published in 1991.

Web-based projects

• 17th Century Women Poets
• Bibliography of Early Modern Women Writers That Are In Print
• British Women Playwrights around 1800
• British Women Romantic Poets, 1789 - 1832
• The Brown University Women Writers Project
• Canadian Women Poets
• A Celebration of Women Writers
• Chawton House Library
• Corvey Women Writers on the Web
• Early Modern Women Database
• Early Modern Women's Poetry
• Emory Women Writers Resource Project
• ARTFL French Women Writers Project
• Girlebooks: free ebooks by women writers
• Internet Women's History Sourcebook
• ARTFL Italian Women Writers Project
• Links to Digitizing Projects of Women Writers
• Medieval Women Writers in Latin
• The Orlando Project: A History of Women's Writing in the British Isles
• The Perdita Project
• Project Electra, Oxford University (under construction)
• The Victorian Women Writers Project
• The Victorian Women Writers Letters Project
• Voices from the Gaps: Women Artists and Writers of Color
• Women Writers of Early Canada
• Women Writers Project
  Women Writers Project
  The Women Writers Project is an initiative based at Brown University, with the aim of making texts by pre-Victorian women writers more accessible. The eventual goal of the project is to make available all English language works written or co-authored by women up to 1850...
  
  
• Women Romantic-Era Writers
• Women’s Travel Writing 1830-1930
• The Women Writers Archive: Early Modern Women Writers Online
• Women Writers Resource Project

Scholarly journals which publish research on women's writing mainly or exclusively

• Atlantis
• Camera Obscura. Duke UP. ISSN: 0270-5346
• Contemporary Women's Writing Oxford University Press ISSN: 1754-1476
• Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture
• differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies. Duke UP. ISSN: 1040-7391
• Feminist Europa. Review of Books
• Feminist Studies
• Femspec: speculative fiction
• Frontiers: a journal of women studies. U of Nebraska P. ISSN: 0160-9009
• Genders
• Hecate: A Women's Interdisciplinary Journal (Australian)
• International Journal of Women's Studies (1978–1985)
• Irish Feminist Review
• The Korean Society for Feminist Studies in English Literature
• Legacy. U of Nebraska P. ISSN: 0748-4321
• Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies
• Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 1975–present.
• Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature ISSN: 07327730
• WILLA: The Women in Literacy and Life Assembly of The National Council of Teachers of English
• Women in the Arts
• Women's Review of Books
• Women Writers ISSN: 1535-8402535-8402
• Women's Writing ISSN: 0969-9082 / ISSN: 1747-5848

Literary and review journals of women's writing

• Australian Women's Book Review
• BlueStockings Journal (Seitô-sha), founded in 1911
• Fireweed (1977–)
• Kalliope, a journal of women's literature & art
• PMS poemmemoirstory (formerly Astarte, 1989–2000)
• Room of One's Own
  Room of One's Own
  Room is a Canadian quarterly literary journal founded to showcase the work of established and emerging Canadian women writers and visual artists. Launched in Vancouver in 1975 by the West Coast Feminist Literary Magazine Publishing Society, the journal has always been operated by an all-volunteer...
  
  (1975–)
• So to Speak
• Tiger Lily (1986–)
• Women's Review of Books (1983–)

See also

• Écriture féminine
  Écriture féminine
  Écriture féminine, literally "women's writing," more closely, the inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text, is a strain of feminist literary theory that originated in France in the early 1970s and included foundational theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Monique...
  
  
• Feminist film theory
  Feminist film theory
  Feminist film theory is theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics and feminist theory. Feminists have many approaches to cinema analysis, regarding the film elements analysed and their theoretical underpinnings.-History:...
  
  
• Feminist literary criticism
  Feminist literary criticism
  Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in...
  
  
• Feminist movement
  Feminist movement
  The feminist movement refers to a series of campaigns for reforms on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, maternity leave, equal pay, women's suffrage, sexual harassment and sexual violence...
  
  
• Feminist science fiction
  Feminist science fiction
  Feminist science fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction which tends to deal with women's roles in society. Feminist science fiction poses questions about social issues such as how society constructs gender roles, the role reproduction plays in defining gender and the unequal political and...
  
  
• Feminist theory
  Feminist theory
  Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...
  
  
• Gender in science fiction
  Gender in science fiction
  Gender has been an important theme explored in speculative fiction. The genres that make up speculative fiction , science fiction, fantasy, supernatural horror and related genres , have always offered the opportunity for writers to explore social conventions, including gender, gender roles, and...
  
  
• History of feminism
  History of feminism
  The history of feminism involves the story of feminist movements and of feminist thinkers. Depending on time, culture and country, feminists around the world have sometimes had different causes and goals...
  
  
• Literary criticism
  Literary criticism
  Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
  
  
• Queer studies
  Queer studies
  Queer studies is the critical theory based study of issues relating to sexual orientation and gender identity usually focusing on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people and cultures. Universities have also labeled this area of analysis Sexual Diversity Studies, Sexualities...
  
  
• Queer theory
  Queer theory
  Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...
  
  
• Women artists
  Women artists
  Women artists have been involved in making art in most times and places. Often certain certain media are associated with women, particularly textile arts; however, these gender roles in art change in different cultures and communities...
  
  
• Women's fiction
  Women's fiction
  Women's fiction is an umbrella term for books that are marketed to female readers, and includes many mainstream novels, romantic fiction, "chick lit,"and other sub genres. It is distinct from Women's writing, which refers to literature written by women...
  
  
• Women's cinema
  Women's cinema
  The term women's cinema usually refers to films made by women. Above all, it designates the work of women film directors and, to a lesser degree, the work of other women behind the camera such as cinematographers and screenwriters...
  
  
• Women letter writers
  Women letter writers
  Women letter writers in early modern Europe created lengthy correspondences, where they expressed their intellect and their creativity; in the process, they also left a rich historic legacy....
  
  
• Women in science fiction
• Women science fiction authors
• The Women's Library (London)
  The Women's Library (London)
  The Women's Library in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets is Britain's main library and museum resource on women and the women's movement, especially concentrating on Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries.The Library has over 60,000 books and pamphlets...
  
  
• Women's music
  Women's music
  Women's music is the music by women, for women, and about women . The genre emerged as a musical expression of the second-wave feminist movement as well as the labor, civil rights, and peace movements...
  
  
• Women's studies
  Women's studies
  Women's studies, also known as feminist studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field which explores politics, society and history from an intersectional, multicultural women's perspective...
  
  

Lists

• List of biographical dictionaries of women writers
• List of early-modern women playwrights (UK)
• List of early-modern women poets (UK)
• List of female detective characters
• List of female detective/mystery writers
• List of feminist literature
• List of literary awards
• List of organizations for women writers
• List of writers in Who's Who in Contemporary Women's Writing
• List of women in Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature
• List of women's presses
• List of women rhetoricians
• List of women writers

• Women's studies at Wikiversity features segments on women's writing