Literature by Women

Showing 97–120 of 202 results

  • Winona; or, The Foster-Sisters

    The prize-winning entry in a national competition for distinctively Canadian fiction, Winona was serialized in a Montreal story paper in 1873. The novel focuses on…

  • Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales

    Vernon Lee writes in the Preface to Hauntings, “My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts... of whom I can affirm only one thing, that…

  • Reuben Sachs

    Oscar Wilde wrote of this novel, “Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word,…

  • The Romance of a Shop

    The Romance of a Shop is an early “New Woman” novel about four sisters, who decide to establish their own photography business and their own…

  • The Distaff Gospels

    The Distaff Gospels (Les Évangiles des Quenouilles), a fascinating fifteenth-century collection of more than 250 popular beliefs, constitutes a kind of encyclopedia of late medieval…

  • Villette

    Charlotte Brontë’s contemporary George Eliot wrote of Villette, “There is something almost preternatural in its power.” The deceptive stillness and security of a girls’ school…

  • The Idea of Being Free

    Mary Hays (1759-1843) is often best remembered for her early revolutionary novels The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice. In this collection,…

  • Shakespeare’s Heroines

    First published in 1832, Shakespeare’s Heroines is a unique hybrid of Shakespeare criticism, women’s rights activism, and conduct literature. Jameson’s collection of readings of female…

  • The Governess

    Published in 1749, the story of Mrs. Teachum and the nine pupils who make up her “little female academy” is widely recognized as the first…

  • The House of Mirth

    One of Edith Wharton’s most accomplished social satires, this novel tells the story of the beautiful but impoverished New York socialite Lily Bart, whose refusal…

  • Adam Bede

    The seemingly peaceful country village of Hayslope is the setting for this ambitious first novel by one of the nineteenth century’s great novelists. With sympathy,…

  • Moths

    First published in 1880, Moths addresses such Victorian taboos as adultery, domestic violence, and divorce in vivid and flamboyant prose. The beautiful young heroine, Vere…

  • The Imperialist

    Set in the fictional Ontario town of Elgin at the beginning of the twentieth century, this 1904 novel was in its own time addressed largely…

  • Romola

    The most exotic of George Eliot’s works, Romola recounts the story of the famous religious leader Savonarola in Florence at the time of Machiavelli and…

  • Nature and Art

    Nature and Art commands a central place in the history of the English Jacobin novel. Published in 1796, the story explores the opposition between the…

  • Anne of Green Gables

    L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables is one of the best-known and most enduringly popular novels of the twentieth century. First published in 1908, it…

  • Celestina

    Published here for the first time in a modern edition, Charlotte Smith’s third novel is both rivetingly plotted and unique for its time in its…

  • Illustrations of Political Economy

    Published in 1832, Illustrations of Political Economy established Harriet Martineau as both a successful and controversial author and a pioneer of nineteenth-century “social problem” writing.…

  • Middlemarch

    George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) is one of the classic novels of English literature and was admired by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English…

  • The Infernal Quixote

    The Infernal Quixote (1801) is an enjoyable comic romp in which Charles Lucas engages directly with the most pressing political issues of his day and…

  • Criminals, Idiots, Women, & Minors – Second Edition

    “Pardon me; I must seem to you so stupid! Why is the property of the woman who commits Murder, and the property of the woman…

  • Sociable Letters

    The writings of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, are remarkable for their vivid depiction of the mores and mentality of seventeenth-century England. This edition includes…

  • Harrington

    Harrington (1817) is the personal narrative of a recovering anti-Semite, a young man whose phobia of Jews is instilled in early childhood and who must…

  • Literature of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign in England

    During the British women’s suffrage campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women wrote plays to convert others to their cause; they wrote…