When first published in 1977, A Literature of Their Own quickly set the stage for the creative explosion of feminist literary studies that transformed the field in the 1980s. Launching a major new area for literary investigation, the book uncovered the long but neglected tradition of women writers in England. A classic of feminist criticism, its impact continues to be felt today.
This revised and expanded edition contains a new introductory chapter surveying the book’s reception and a new postscript chapter celebrating the legacy of feminism and feminist criticism in the efflorescence of contemporary British fiction by women.
Elaine Showalter is Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University. She has written and edited many books, including The Female Malady: Women, Madness and Society 1830-1980, Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing, Scribbling Women: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century Women, and Hystories. She is currently working on a study of feminist intellectuals.
"A Literature of Their Own places the women novelists everyone has heard of ... in a new setting, considering them in relation to their relatively unknown female contemporaries. The resulting shift of perspective generates fresh social and literary understanding."—Patricia Meyer Spacks, The New York Times Book Review
"Ought to be required reading for anyone who cares about women or the history of the novel. [This book] is a rare thing: a book of literary criticism that illuminates our lives."—Erica Jong, The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"This book is absolutely and immediately essential reading.... It will remain for a very long time a book to refer to again and again for both information and ideas."—John Goode, The Times Higher Education Supplement
