These three works of fiction - two by Mary Wollstonecraft, the radical author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and one by her daughter Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein - are powerfully emotive stories that combine passion with forceful feminist argument. In Mary Wollstonecraft's Mary, the heroine flees her young husband in order to nurse her dearest friend, Ann, and finds genuine love, while Maria tells of a desperate young woman who seeks consolation in the arms of another man after the loss of her child. And Mary Shelley's Matilda - suppressed for over a century - tells the...

Examining the writing of Aphra Behn, Frances Sheridan, Ann Radcliffe and Fanny Burney among others, this study describes the entry of women into literature as a profession in the 17th century. It describes how the fictional genre became the main vehicle for female self-expression.

You will smile at an observation that has just occurred to me: --I consider those minds as the most strong and original, whose imagination acts as the stimulus to their senses, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in a letter contemplating the role of the imagination in human relationships. Enlightenment feminist and famed author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was also one of the most distinctive letter writers of the eighteenth century. This volume contains all of her known correspondence.

Wollstonecraft talked and thought on paper; her letters were a large part...

Aphra Behn was England's first professional woman writer, but her status as a major author has only recently become clear. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries Behn was denigrated for her "unwomanly" subject matter and intellectual immodesty. In the twentieth century she has been increasingly viewed as a leading dramatist of the Restoration and a founder of the English novel. This collection forms an important resource for those studying seventeenth century English literature and drama, and for those interested in the development of women's writing.

Traditionally known as the first professional woman writer in English, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) has now emerged as one of the major figures of the Restoration, providing more plays for the stage than any other author and greatly influencing the development of the novel. Behn's work straddles the genres of drama, fiction, poetry and translation. With its full bibliography, detailed chronology and a description of the known facts of her life, this Companion is essential to studying her work.

Traditionally known as the first professional woman writer in English, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) has now emerged as one of the major figures of the Restoration, providing more plays for the stage than any other author and greatly influencing the development of the novel. Behn's work straddles the genres of drama, fiction, poetry and translation. With its full bibliography, detailed chronology and a description of the known facts of her life, this Companion is essential to studying her work.

The accident of death makes Persuasion Jane Austen's final novel. It deserves its position by its innovative treatment of passion and rhetorical style and its development of those themes of memory and time, public and private history, inner and outer lives, language and literature, emotion and restraint that have marked all Austen's work. Where the other works move towards a new symbolic and physical home for the heroine, Persuasion begins with her ejection and ends with her understanding that home is not a place at all but an ambiance and an acceptance of change. This volume, first published...

Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen's first published novel (1811), introduced its readers to many of the themes which would dominate Austen's future work. On one level it is a simple story of two sisters finding fulfilment within a society bounded by regulations and restrictions. But on another it is a comprehensive exploration of the moral dilemmas facing young women in the choices they have to make about their lives. Austen writes about everyday events of her own time with a subtlety and sensitivity unprecedented in the English novel. This edition, first published in 2006, takes as its...

'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.' With this famous declaration Jane Austen launches into the story of the five Bennet sisters. It is a story that on first reading is full of suspense, surprise and, ultimately, satisfaction, and which on re-reading commands, in addition, admiration for the author's supreme skill in managing a deceptively complex plot to its triumphant conclusion. First published in 1813, and Austen's most popular novel in her own lifetime, Pride and Prejudice has since been widely recognised as...

Had B.G. MacCarthy's criticism been available, Showalter's A Literature of Their Own would have been a very different kind of book...In some ways, contemporary could be ten years ahead if we had started the climb from MacCarthy's groundwork.-
--Maggie Humm, University of East London

Back in print for the first time since the 1940's, this classic work of pre-feminist literary criticism is a challenging and authoritative assessment of women's contributions to English literature. B. G. MacCarthy, widely praised for the originality of her scholarship, challenges the dominant...