Feminist and Protofeminist Literature

  • Three Guineas

    Three Guineas

    In Three Guineas, first published in June, 1938 (as the threat of war between Britain and Nazi Germany was looming larger day by day) Virginia…

  • The Awakening and Other Writings

    The Awakening and Other Writings

    Critically acclaimed as Kate Chopin’s most influential work of fiction, The Awakening has assumed a place in the American literary canon. This new edition places…

  • Epistles On Women and Other Works

    Epistles On Women and Other Works

    Henry James wrote of Lucy Aikin: “Clever, sagacious, shrewd ... and an accomplished writer, one wonders why her vigorous intellectual temperament has not attracted independent…

  • "We Must Be Up and Doing"

    “We Must Be Up and Doing”

    African American women have been “up and doing” for their communities for as long as they have been in the United States, and their ability…

  • Autobiographical Sketches

    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: 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

    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…

  • Lydia Sigourney

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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…

  • Sophia

    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…

  • The London Jilt

    The London Jilt

    This entertaining novel’s full title, which claims that it will show “All the Artifices and Strategems which the Ladies of Pleasure make use of for…

  • The Woman of Colour

    The Woman of Colour

    The Woman of Colour is a unique literary account of a black heiress’ life immediately after the abolition of the British slave trade. Olivia Fairfield,…

  • Suffragette Sally

    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…

  • The Second Mrs Tanqueray

    The Second Mrs Tanqueray

    The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was the theatrical sensation of the London stage in 1893. It established Pinero as the leading English dramatist of serious social…

  • My Brilliant Career

    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…

  • A Simple Story

    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

    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…

  • Wuthering Heights - Ed. Newman

    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

    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…

  • Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Second Edition

    Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Second Edition

    This classic novel tells the story of how the poor rural couple John and Joan Durbeyfield become convinced that they are descended from the ancient…

  • Autobiography

    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,…