Shakespeare and The Nature of Women, first published in 1975, inaugurated a new wave of feminist scholarship. It claimed that Shakespeare's plays offered a sustained critique of inherited male thinking about women, theological, literary and social. The book argued that the presence of the boy actor in Shakespeare's theatre created an awareness of gender as performance. Almost thirty years on, it continues to be the corner-stone of writing about women in this period and the spring-board for new research.

With its explorations of sexual ambivalence, As You Like It speaks directly to the twenty-first century. Juliet Dusinberre demonstrates that Rosalindas authority in the play grows from new ideas about women and reveals that Shakespeareas heroine reinvents herself for every age. But the play is also deeply rooted in Elizabethan culture and through it Shakespeare addresses some of the hotly debated issues of the period. "This will be the definitive edition of As You Like It for many years to come" - Phyllis Rackin, University of Pennsylvania

Alice to the Lighthouse is the first and only full-length study of the relation between children's literature and writing for adults. Lewis Carroll's Alice books created a revolution in writing for and about children which had repercussions not only for subsequent children's writers--Stevenson, Kipling, Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Mark Twain--but for Virginia Woolf and her generation. Virginia Woolf's celebration of writing as play rather than preaching is the twin of the Post-Impressionist art championed by Roger Fry. Juliet Dusinberre connects books for children in the late...