As a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray candidly and often humorously asserted her opinions about the social and political conditions of women in late eighteenth-century America. As a committed feminist, she urged American women to enter a "new era in female history," yet published her own writings under a man's name in hopes of more widely disseminating her ideas. Murray published poems, essays, and plays regularly in the Massachusetts Magazine. Throughout this early work, Murray addressed various controversial topics, including female education,...
As a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray candidly and often humorously asserted her opinions about the social and political...
Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) was the author of ten novels, a play, and a host of innovative educational books for children, as well as several volumes of poetry that helped set priorities and determine the tastes of the culture of early Romanticism. Her Elegiac Sonnets sparked the sonnet revival in English Romanticism; The Emigrants initiated its passion for lengthy meditative introspection; and Beachy Head lent its poetic engagement with nature a uniquely telling immediacy. Smith was a woman, Wordsworth remarked a quarter century after her death, "to whom English...
Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) was the author of ten novels, a play, and a host of innovative educational books for children, as well as several volumes ...
Catharine Williams (1787-1872) lived most of her life in Rhode Island, where she supported herself and her daughter by a productive literary career. Her most compelling work, Fall River, last published in 1833, recreates a notorious incident in the ill-fated town of Fall River, Massachusetts: the trial of a Methodist minister for the murder of a pregnant mill worker whom it was suspected he had seduced. Williams's investigative report offers a vivid contemporary view of the lives of poor "factory girls" and of clerical corruption in the industrial towns of early New England. While...
Catharine Williams (1787-1872) lived most of her life in Rhode Island, where she supported herself and her daughter by a productive literary career. H...
Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) was the first woman poet in England who sought status as a professional writer. Her book of poems is dedicated entirely to women patrons. It offers a long poem on Christ's passion, told entirely from a woman's point of view, as well as the first country house poem published in England. Almost completely neglected until very recently, her work changes our perspective on Jacobean poetry and contradicts the common assumption that women wrote nothing of serious interest until much later. Mistress and friend of influential Elizabethan courtiers, Lanyer gives us a glimpse...
Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) was the first woman poet in England who sought status as a professional writer. Her book of poems is dedicated entirely to ...
Rachel Speght was the first Englishwoman to identify herself, unmistakably and by name, as a polemicist and critic of contemporary gender ideology. This edition includes her polemical foray into the Jacobean gender wars and her collected poems. Speght's tract, A Mouzzell for Melastomus (1617), is at once a spirited answer to Joseph Swetnam's attack on women and a serious effort to stake women's claim to the prevailing Protestant discourse of biblical exegesis. In other words, she tried to yield a more expansive and more equitable concept of gender. Speght's volume of poems,...
Rachel Speght was the first Englishwoman to identify herself, unmistakably and by name, as a polemicist and critic of contemporary gender ideology. Th...
Rachel Speght was the first Englishwoman to identify herself, unmistakably and by name, as a polemicist and critic of contemporary gender ideology. This edition includes her foray into the Jacobean gender wars and her collected poems. Speght's tract, A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617), is at once a spirited answer to Joseph Swetnam's attack on women and a serious effort to stake women's claim to the prevailing Protestant discourse of biblical exegesis, in order to define a more expansive and more equitable concept of gender. Speght's volume of poems, Mortalities Memorandum with a...
Rachel Speght was the first Englishwoman to identify herself, unmistakably and by name, as a polemicist and critic of contemporary gender ideology. Th...
Novelist, religious dissident, political poet, and sometime Jacobite spy, Jane Barker wrote on a remarkable variety of subjects and displayed a facility with an equally remarkable variety of genres. Most extraordinary, though, was her ability to manipulate the objects of female domesticity, an embroidered patch-work screen for example, as literary conceits to rival those of her male contemporaries. "A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies" (1723) and "The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen (1726), both part of The Galesia Trilogy, attest to her talents; they include realistic stories and...
Novelist, religious dissident, political poet, and sometime Jacobite spy, Jane Barker wrote on a remarkable variety of subjects and displayed a facili...
Eleanor Davies (1590-1652) was one of the most prolific women writing in early seventeenth-century England. This volume includes thirty-eight of the sixty-some prophetic tracts that she published. Inspired to prophecy by a visionary experience in 1625, the year of Charles I's accession to the throne, she devoted herself to warning her contemporaries that the Day of Judgement was imminent. Her zeal and her intricately constructed tracts confounded contemporaries who called her mad. She experienced repeated imprisonment and also confinement to Bedlam, London's mental hospital. The tracts tell...
Eleanor Davies (1590-1652) was one of the most prolific women writing in early seventeenth-century England. This volume includes thirty-eight of the s...
Lady Arbella Stuart (1575-1615) was a claimant to the English throne whose more than one hundred letters to relatives, her husband, the royal family, court officials, and friends reveal a powerful personal and public drama. Stuart's royal birth and demand for independence twice placed her in direct conflict with Queen Elizabeth and King James over an unauthorized marriage, once in 1603 when she attempted to marry clandestinely and again in 1610 when she did marry, then escaped from her subsequent confinement and was recaptured. In her letters, Stuart applies her considerable rhetorical skills...
Lady Arbella Stuart (1575-1615) was a claimant to the English throne whose more than one hundred letters to relatives, her husband, the royal family, ...
Anna Weamys's A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney'sArcadia is a woman's contribution to one of the dominant genres of her sex's readership in the seventeenth century: the heroic romance. Part of the considerable power and appeal of this work is its reduction of the heroic romance to a smaller scale. In its shorter length and its comparatively direct style, it avoids the fustian and bloat of the form. At the same time, it elaborates on the genre's stronger points--its playfulness and fantasy, its explorations of the nuances of sensibility--while not sacrificing its...
Anna Weamys's A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney'sArcadia is a woman's contribution to one of the dominant genres of her s...