Books in the Women Writers in English 1350-1850 series

This new addition to the Women Writers in English series records Anne Askew's narrative of her imprisonment for heresy and her interrogation by officials of church and state in the last days of Henry VIII. As a spiritual autobiography, a historical document, and a carefully crafted polemic, the work provides insight into Reformation politics and society in England.

Shelley's second novel, focuses on the intricate details of 13th-century Tuscan politics, with a resolute filtering of the bloody heroics of the age through the sensibilities of two women who are destroyed by them. A feminist perspective so conspicuously missing from "Frankenstein" is revealed.

Rachel Speght (1597-?) was the first Englishwoman to identify herself as a polemicist and critic of contemporary gender ideology. This study discusses both her tract, "A Mouzell for Melastomus" (1617) and her volume of poetry, "Mortalities Memorandum, with a Dreame Prefixed" (1612).

Lady Arbella Stuart, claimant to the English throne, traditionally has been portrayed as either a hero or fool for marrying against King James's edict and attempting to flee from France. This is Stuart's story as told in the more than 100 letters she wrote to her husband, relatives and friends.

When the midwife Jane Sharp wrote The Midwives Book in 1671, she became the first British woman to publish a midwifery manual. Drawing on works by her male contemporaries, and weaving together medical information and lively anecdotes, she produced a book that is instructive, accessible, witty, and constantly surprising.

The first edition of the collected poetry and prose of the Restoration feminist, Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656-1710), this volume includes The Ladies Defence as well as her final prose meditations. New biographical and bibliographical information in the Introduction revises the existing accounts of her life and literary career. The volume makes available for the first time the complete range of Chudleigh''s literary experiments and calls for a reassessment ofthe image of the woman writer of the Restoration. A friend of John Dryden and Mary Astell, Chudleigh experimented with a variety of literary forms, from satire to biblical paraphrase, but always maintained her belief in the importance of education for women and the necessity for self-determination.

In the 1740s and 50s Eliza Haywood, novelist, edited several serial newspapers, including "The Female Spectator", which was written with a markedly female audience in mind. This text contains selections of this modern periodical both written by a woman and addressed to a female audience.

Catharine Williams (1787-1872) lived most of her life in Rhode Island, where she supported herself and her daughter by a productive literary career. Her most compelling work, Fall River, last published in 1833, recreates a notorious incident in the ill-fated town of Fall River, Massachusetts: the trial of a Methodist minister for the murder of a pregnant mill worker whom it was suspected he had seduced. Williams''s investigative report offers a vividcontemporary view of the lives of poor "factory girls" and of clerical corruption in the industrial towns of early New England. While based in fact, the book raises themes of sexual and religious hypocrisy and exploitation that may be compared with those of novels like The Coquette, Uncle Tom''s Cabin, and The ScarletLetter. At the same time, the author''s mixture of journalism, biography, fiction, and exhortation makes this "authentic narrative" an unusual challenge to traditional notions of literary form and yields fresh insights into the nature of early American women''s writing.

Eleanor Davies was one of the most prolific women writing in early - 17th-century England. This volume includes 38 of her tracts, revealing her experiences as a woman and exhibiting her extraordinary intellect, extensive education and fascination with words.

Anne Weamys's Arcadia offers an alternate perspective on the genre of historical romance. Shorter and comparatively more direct than the form of its derivation, the Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia exploits the genre's capacity for fantasy and nuance while celebrating its more subversive uses as political statement.

This edition provides representative texts from Eliza Haywood's career, which overlaps that of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. The six fictions and two plays provided here illustrate the many kinds of writing she produced, and the ways she treated important themes and issues.

As a novelist, essayist, dramatist and poet, Judith Sargent Murray candidly and often humorously asserted her opinions about the social and political conditions of women in late 18th-century America. This volume includes selections from "The Gleaner", her major work, and other publications.

Novelist, religious convert, political poet and sometime Jacobite spy, Barker wrote prolifically on a remarkable variety of subjects. "A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies" (1723) and "The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen" (1726) achieved immense popularity upon first appearance.

Part of a series on women writers in English between 1350 and 1850, this volume contains the poems of Charlotte Smith.

Book of poems: Aemilia Lanyer ( 1545-1645) was the first woman poet in England who sought status as a professional writer; her poems are dedicated entirely to women patrons. This collection features a long poem on Christ's passion, told from a woman's point of view, as well as the first country house poem published in England.