Books like Joyce Carol Oates by Joanne V. Creighton

Pride and Prejudice is a classic novel by Jane Austen.

Harper Lee’s 1960 classic follows young Scout Finch in Depression‑era Alabama as her father, lawyer Atticus Finch, defends a black man accused of rape, confronting racism, prejudice, and the moral growth of a child.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece examines the glittering yet hollow glamour of the Roaring Twenties as the enigmatic Jay Gatsby pursues love, wealth, and identity across the social divide.

A dystopian novel about a woman named Offred in a totalitarian theonomic society called Gilead, exploring themes of subjugated women and resistance.

Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer‑winning work follows Sethe, an escaped slave living in post‑Civil War Ohio, as she confronts the traumatic past that rises again in the form of a mysterious child named Beloved.

A contemporary day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a 1920s London politician’s wife, as she prepares for an evening party and is haunted by memories of youth, friendships, and past loves.

The Bell Jar is the sole novel by Sylvia Plath, a psychologically intense and autobiographical look at a young woman’s decline into mental illness.

A collection of critical essays on this well-known American writer and her works.

Katherine Mansfield is remembered for writing brilliant short stories that helped to initiate the modernist period in British fiction, and for the fact that her life - lived at a feverish pace on the fringes of Bloomsbury during the First World War - ended after a prolonged battle with pulmonary disease when she was only thirty-four years old. While her life was marred by emotional and physical afflictions of the most extreme kind, argues Mary Burgan in Illness, Gender, and Writing, her stories have seemed to exist in isolation from those afflictions - as stylish expressions of the "new," as romantic triumphs of art over tragic circumstances, or as wavering expressions of Mansfield's early feminism. In the first book to look at the continuum of a writer's life and work in terms of that writer's various illnesses, Burgan explores Katherine Mansfield's recurrent emotional and physical afflictions as the ground of her writing. Mansfield is remarkably suited to this approach, Burgan contends, because her "illnesses" ranged from such early psychological afflictions as separation anxiety, body image disturbances, and fear of homosexuality to bodily afflictions that included miscarriage and abortion, venereal disease, and tuberculosis. Offering a thorough and provocative reading of Mansfield's major texts, Illness, Gender, and Writing shows how Mansfield negotiated her illnesses and, in so doing, sheds new light on the study of women's creativity. Mansfield's drive toward self-integration, Burgan concludes, was her strategy for writing - and for staying alive.