Literature by Women

Showing 1–24 of 189 results

  • Githa Sowerby: Three Plays

    Githa Sowerby’s Rutherford and Son took the London theatre by storm in 1912. Following its triumphant run, the play toured to New York, was produced…

  • Moral Tales: A Selection

    In their moral tales, writers such as Hannah More, Amelia Opie, and Maria Edgeworth embraced explicitly didactic aims, seeking to instill normative moral behavior in…

  • Hagar’s Daughter

    Hagar’s Daughter is Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s first serial novel, published in the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1901-02). The novel features concealed and mistaken identities, dramatic…

  • Barford Abbey

    The great-grandmother of Downton Abbey, Barford Abbey is among the first of a new genre of “abbey fictions.” Using the abbey as both a site…

  • Dreams

    Dreams is a work that defies conventional categorization; however, one might best capture its unique formal structure by construing it as a series of prose…

  • Are They Women?

    Deeply engaged in women’s rights debates and discussions of the “third sex,” Are They Women? is about the lively communities of lesbians across turn-of-the-century central…

  • Agnes Grey

    Agnes Grey was one of a trio of novels that defined the “governess novel” in 1847 and 1848. Alongside Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, Agnes…

  • Pride and Prejudice – Second Edition

    Elizabeth Bennet is Austen’s most liberated and appealing heroine, and Pride and Prejudice has remained over most of the past two centuries Austen’s most popular…

  • Oroonoko

    The best-known work by Aphra Behn, Oroonoko is an important contribution to the development of the novel in English. Though it predates the British abolition…

  • The Library Window

    In this Victorian tale, a young woman recuperating at her aunt’s house in a Scottish town is spending a good deal of time looking out…

  • Castle Rackrent

    Castle Rackrent—Maria Edgeworth’s first novel, and the work for which she was and is best known—occupies a most unusual place in the history both of…

  • Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond

    Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond—among the most compelling and thought-provoking of Margaret Oliphant’s works of short fiction—tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Lycett-Landon, “two…

  • The Works of Gwerful Mechain

    All of Gwerful Mechain’s known work is included here—as are several poems of uncertain authorship, and a selection of other works that help to fill…

  • Iola Leroy

    Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil…

  • The Lais of Marie de France

    Composed in French in twelfth-century England, these twelve brief verse narratives center on the joys, sorrows, and complications of love affairs in a context that…

  • Tender Buttons

    The first publisher of Tender Buttons described the book’s effect on readers as “something like terror, there are no known precedents to cling to.” Written…

  • A City Girl

    In April 1888, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the English novelist and journalist Margaret Harkness, expressing his appreciation for her first novel, A City…

  • Mathilda

    Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, the story of one woman’s existential struggle after learning of her father’s desire for her, has been identified as Shelley’s most important…

  • Ida May

    The sentimental antislavery novel Ida May appeared so like its predecessor in the genre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that for the month of November 1854, reviewers…

  • Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works

    Immensely popular with contemporary readers, Smith’s major poetic works are foundational texts of the Romantic period. Smith’s innovations in poetic form have also placed her…

  • A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West

    Mary Ann Shadd’s pamphlet A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West is, as the title promises, a settler guide designed to inform prospective…

  • The Half-Caste

    Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste concerns the coming-of-age of its title character, the mixed-race Zillah Le Poer, daughter of an English merchant and an Indian…

  • Kelroy

    Kelroy, a nearly-forgotten 1812 novel by Rebecca Rush, combines the refinement of the novel of manners with the Gothic novel’s hidden evil to tell the…

  • The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World

    First published in 1666, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’s Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World is the first fictional portrayal of women…