Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi is Professor of English at Stanford University, where she has taught since 1968. She is the author of Shelleyis Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity and Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature, as well as numerous articles on, mainly, feminist and psychological literature. She is an editor of several important volumes, including Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideologies and Women and Poverty.