Literature by Women

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  Passing

  Written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance (the first sustained artistic movement by African Americans) and of Jim Crow (one of this cultural group’s…

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  The Romance of the Forest

  Adeline, the protagonist of Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, became a model for later Gothic heroines. Passionate, imaginative, and sensitive, in the course…

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  The Noble Slaves

  This is the first ever critical edition of Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves, a novel that shows women as both moral exemplars and independent adventurers…

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  The Life of Madame de Beaumount and The Life of Charlotta du Pont

  The prose fiction of Penelope Aubin offers a delightful and provocative challenge to many of our standard ways of thinking about both the “rise of…

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  Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Selections

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin may well have excited more controversy than any other work of fiction in American history. Welcomed by many abolitionists and met with…

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  Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems and Letters

  This compact edition, designed for use in undergraduate courses, combines a substantial selection of Dickinson’s poems (including one complete fascicle) with a selection of letters…

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  Fanny Fern: Selected Writings

  Fanny Fern dominated the New York literary scene in the 1850s, garnering both esteem and, occasionally, derision for her witty and acerbic newspaper columns and…

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  Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom

  As Americans began defining who was to be counted a citizen in their newly-established republic, Susanna Rowson’s comic opera Slaves in Algiers (1794) makes an…

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  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

  In 1861, Harriet Jacobs became the first formerly enslaved African American woman to publish a book-length account of her life. In crafting her coming-of-age story,…

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  Women and Economics and Other Writings

  This new edition of Women and Economics highlights the importance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman as a leading public intellectual of the Progressive Era. It contains…

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  Of One Blood

  The Afrofuturist plot of Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–03) weaves together a lost African city, bigamy, incest, murder, ancient prophecies, a thwarted leopard…

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  Jane Eyre – Second Edition

  Jane Eyre, the story of a young girl and her passage into adulthood, was an immediate commercial success at the time of its original publication…

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  The Uninhabited House

  Charlotte Riddell’s The Uninhabited House (1875) tells the story of River Hall and the secrets that are hidden behind its doors. Within this haunted house,…

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  Branded

  When Branded: A Diary was published in Berlin in 1920, Emmy Hennings was called the most important woman writer of her day. Her autobiographical novel…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…

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  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…