Books like Literature of Their Own by Elaine Showalter

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

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.

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.

This lively book surveys women writers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its selection is vast, historically representative, and original, taking examples from twenty different, relatively unknown authors in all genres of writing, including poetry, fiction, religious works, letters and journals, translation, and books on childcare. It establishes new contexts for the debate about women as writers within the period and suggests potential intertextual connections with works by well-known male authors of the same time. Individual authors and works are given concise introductions, with both modern and historical critical analysis, setting them in a theoretical and historicised context. All texts are made readily accessible through modern spelling and punctuation, on-the-page annotation and headnotes. The substantial, up-to-date bibliography provides a source for further study and research. Suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate literature students studying the Renaissance or taking courses in women's writing, and of related interest to historians of the period.