Literature by Women

  • Zofloya

    Zofloya

    The protagonist of Charlotte Dacre’s best known novel, Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) is unique in women’s Gothic and Romantic literature, and has more in…

  • Lodore

    Lodore

    Beset by jealousy over an admirer of his wife’s, Lord Lodore has come with his daughter Ethel to the American wilderness; his wife Cornelia, meanwhile,…

  • Set in Authority

    Set in Authority

    In 1906, two years after the appearance of her best-known novel, The Imperialist, Duncan published its darker twin, an Anglo-Indian novel which returns to political…

  • The Last Man

    The Last Man

    Mary Shelley’s third published novel, The Last Man, is a disillusioned vision of the end of civilization, set in the twenty-first century. The book offers…

  • Something New

    Something New

    To be a heroine is to be beautiful—such has been the unstated assumption from the time of chivalric romance to that of Harlequin romance. But…

  • Millenium Hall

    Millenium Hall

    In 1750 at the age of twenty-seven Sarah Scott published her first novel, a conventional romance. A year later she left her husband after only…

  • Nineteenth-Century Stories by Women

    Nineteenth-Century Stories by Women

    “The female novelist of the nineteenth century may have frequently encountered opposition and interference from the male literary establishment, but the female short story writer,…

  • The Dreamer Awakes

    The Dreamer Awakes

    The late Alice Kane was born in Ireland in 1908. Moving with her parents to Canada in 1921, she was educated in New Brunswick and…

  • A Bold Stroke for a Wife

    A Bold Stroke for a Wife

    Though critics and literary historians have always had to admit that Susanna Centlivre’s comedies were extremely popular, they have tended to devote themselves to a…