Literature by Women

• 

  The Basset Table

  The Basset Table follows the fortunes of Lady Reveller, who runs a table where her friends play the card game basset, and her struggle to…

• 

  The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

  Anne Brontë’s second and last novel was widely and contentiously reviewed upon its 1848 publication, in part because its subject matter domestic violence, alcoholism, women’s…

• 

  Autobiographical Sketches

  Annie Wood Besant (1847-1933) was a problematic and notorious figure in Victorian England, questioning and then breaking from the Anglican Church to become an atheist,…

• 

  Michael Field: The Poet

  “Michael Field” was the literary pseudonym of two women, Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913). The women were poets, playwrights, diarist, and…

• 

  Reuben and Rachel

  Susanna Haswell Rowson, a popular and prolific writer, actress, and educator in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had a truly transatlantic life and…

• 

  The Custom of the Country

  Ruthless and predatory, Edith Wharton’s seductive young heroine Undine Spragg exploits a series of husbands from the American west to New York and France in…

• 

  Euphemia

  Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia, published in 1790 at the end of her professional career, is an extraordinary account of pre-Revolutionary America from a woman’s perspective. Constructed…

• 

  Lydia Sigourney

  Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865) was the most widely read and respected pre-Civil War American woman poet in the English-speaking world. In a half-century career, Sigourney…

• 

  Prisons and Prisoners

  Prisons and Prisoners is the autobiography of aristocratic suffragette Constance Lytton. In it, she details her militant actions in the struggle to gain the vote…

• 

  Nightwalkers

  This anthology makes available for the first time a selection of narratives by and about prostitutes in the eighteenth century. These memoirs, some written by…

• 

  A Sunless Heart

  In A Sunless Heart, Edith Johnstone establishes a feverish atmosphere for her novel’s story of emotional and physical hardship and the power of bonds between…

• 

  Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain

  Though working-class women in the nineteenth century included many accomplished and prolific poets, their work has often been neglected by critics and readers in favour…

• 

  Ramona

  Ramona has often been compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its influence on American social policy, and this is the only edition available that presents…

• 

  Sophia

  The first novel to be written for serial publication by a major female author, Sophia follows the story of two siblings, the virtuous and well-read…

• 

  Suffragette Sally

  Published in 1911, Suffragette Sally is one of the best-known popular novels promoting the cause of women’s suffrage in Britain at the beginning of the…

• 

  My Brilliant Career

  Written by a teenager living in the Australian bush in the 1890s and originally published in 1901, Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career is a candid…

• 

  Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Laura

  Based on Leonora Sansay’s eyewitness accounts of the final days of French rule in Saint Domingue (Haiti), Secret History is a vivid account of race…

• 

  A Simple Story

  After its publication in early 1791, A Simple Story was widely read in England and abroad, going into a second edition in March of the…

• 

  Coelebs in Search of a Wife

  In this, Hannah More’s only novel and an early nineteenth-century best-seller, More gives voice to a wealthy twenty-three-year-old bachelor, who styles himself “Coelebs” (unmarried), but…

• 

  The Scottish Chiefs

  Rooted in political controversy, gender warfare, violence, and revolution, Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs is the epic story of William Wallace’s struggle for Scottish independence…

• 

  Wuthering Heights – Ed. Newman

  Over a hundred and fifty years after its initial publication, Emily Brontë’s turbulent portrayal of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, two northern English households nearly…

• 

  The Mill on the Floss

  This classic novel, first published in 1860, tells the story of Maggie Tulliver. Intelligent and headstrong but trapped by the conventions of family tradition and…

• 

  Autobiography

  Harriet Martineau lived an extraordinary literary life. She became a reviewer and journalist in the 1820s when her family’s fortune collapsed; published a best-selling series,…

• 

  The Memoir of 1603 and the Diary of 1616-1619

  Anne Clifford’s memoir for the year 1603 and her diary of 1616-1619 are invaluable records of the daily life and social and family relationships of…