Books like Inventing Herself by Elaine Showalter

Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay argues for women writers’ rightful place in a patriarchal literary tradition, using both fictional narrative and lecture recordings.

Judith Butler’s seminal text challenges essentialist views of sex and gender, proposing that identity is constructed through repeated social performances.

Judy Grahn explores gay culture from ancient times to the present, blending history, myth, tribal traditions, occult elements, and personal interviews to illuminate the rich patterns of gay life.

Gertrude Stein’s witty memoir recasts the life of her companion Alice B. Toklas, illuminating the Parisian intellectual scene of the 1920s and the creative orbit around Picasso.

Explores the psychological themes and literary influence of six pioneering women writers – Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.

Examples of fiction, poetry and drama dealing with the feminine experience and historical, psychological and sociological statements about women.

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 and the development of their fiction from the 1800s onwards. It includes assessments of famous writers such as the Brontës, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing, but also presents critical appraisals of Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and Sarah Grand --- to name but a few of those prolific and successful Victorian novelists - --once household names, now largely forgotten.

From the Blurb: A "prequel" to the highly acclaimed The Quotable Woman: 1800-1981, this all-new volume mines the centuries to create a treasury of additional quotations from outspoken women born from biblical times through the end of the eighteenth century. Arranged chronologically, the book's more than 6,000 quotations range all over the world and touch on nearly every subject imaginable-friendship, politics, love, religion, education, the arts, woman's role in society. Marked by the same completeness, exacting scholarship, and sense of discovery as the previous volume, The Quotable Woman: From Eve to 1799 reacquaints us with the world's most famous women-Sappho, Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette, and Jane Austen, to name only a few. In addition, the book introduces us to hundreds of fascinating women nearly forgotten by history, whose thoughts are nonetheless as timely today as the day they were uttered. Complete biographical and subject indexes are included.