Angela Keane addresses the work of five women writers of the 1790s and its problematic relationship with the canon of Romantic literature. Refining arguments that women's writing has been overlooked, Keane examines the more complex underpinnings and exclusionary effects of the English national literary tradition. The book explores the negotiations of literate, middle-class women such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Ann Radcliffe with emergent ideas of national literary representation.

Born in a convent to an unwed mother before adoption was legal in Ireland, Maura O'Sullivan was raised by a "nursing mother." She knew she was different from her two older siblings but her history was never discussed in her childhood home. Her journey in the pursuit of happiness took her from Ireland to England and finally to America. While living in America Maura got what she wanted most in life: a family of her own. "I was going to have a baby whether I was married or not, it was just that important to me," she says. Maura married her American sweetheart, and they raised four daughters...

When Marge Hall walked up to Roy Johnson and asked him to dance she had no idea what she was about to set in motion. Roy, the boy who skipped school to go fishing, picked blueberries in the mountains, and skated on the frozen ponds of Connecticut, decided right then he was going to marry her. But before he could make Marge his wife, he had a war to fight, letters to write, and doubts to erase, and when he returned from China, where he served as a radio operator on a B-24 bomber, his dream came true. Shortly after their wedding on November 11, 1944, Roy set a much harder goal for himself. "My...