Women Writers – serie

19th century American writers often differ by gender in the stories they tell about the American experience. The male quest most often depicts the hero's journey away from the domestic world of women; the female quest situates the heroine within the domestic world of marriage and motherhood. This study considers Edith Wharton's fiction in opposition to both the male pastoral romance and the female domestic novel. Like other American women writers, Wharton places her protagonists within the social, domestic world. Unlike male romancers who celebrate escape from society, she depicts the inevitable bond or covenant between the individual and the group. Wharton differs, however, from the female novelists who celebrate domesticity by emphasizing the bonds or restrictions the group imposes on the individual.

Through close readings of Doris Lessing's novels from The Grass is Singing to The Fifth Child, Margaret Moan Rowe maps many of the literary and cultural negotiations that make Doris Lessing both a maverick and a mainstream novelist. Examining the pull of paternal and maternal biographical and literary identification in Lessing, Rowe relates them to the tensions between the ordinary and the visionary in her fiction.

Jean Rhys' writings are examined through the frames of feminist criticism and literary theory, providing close readings of the texts and their language. The book explores the various forms of feminine dissent at work in Jean Rhys' fiction. She is shown to develop an ethics of subversion through resistance to closure, irony, parody and her daring rewriting of Jane Eyre. Each novel is treated as a complete aesthetic whole, with substantial references to the short stories, for a more penetrating insight into Jean Rhys' fictional universe.

It is 1915, and Miranda Gray is spending the war on the other side of the Atlantic to her Canadian husband. Staying with her eccentric relatives and young son at her family’s stately home, Star Cross, Miranda struggles to find her wartime role. Is she the stoic wife of a distant military man, the duty-bound nurse, the promiscuous society hostess, reluctant muse to a pacifist poet, a mother, a sister, a daughter, or some amalgamation of all? Gradually, as the war brings death and destruction to those closest to her, Miranda is offered a glimpse of something beyond these stilted roles – a chance at real love. The Spring House artfully balances humour and devastation; at once a deftly written psychological portrait and a social document revealing the slow birth of the twentieth century and the new woman.

From domineering mothers and very modern daughters to the quiet dreamers on either side of the generational divide, this anthology sketches a joyous, fraught, and ultimately tender portrait of mother-daughter relationships throughout the 20th century. These are the stories of a mother who helps dispatch her daughter's unwanted suitor, a daughter who enters a sanatorium and starts to question if her mother really wants her to get better, and the glorious chaos that descends on a woman's quiet country cottage when her daughters return home for a weekend. Across the decades, women writers return to perpetual teenage daughters that rebel perpetually against maternal tradition and mothers who start to see their own mothers' shadows on the wall. Brought together in this collection is a moving testament to the inextricable and ineffable bond between mothers and daughters, in all its lovely and imperfect forms. This new anthology brings together the creative minds of: Phyllis Bottome Richmal Crompton E. M. Delafield Winifred Holtby and Sylvia Townsend Warner

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Through close readings of Doris Lessing''s novels from The Grass is Singing to The Fifth Child, Margaret Moan Rowe maps many of the literary and cultural negotiations that make Doris Lessing both a maverick and a mainstream novelist. Examining the pull of paternal and maternal biographical and literary identification in Lessing, Rowe relates them to the tensions between the ordinary and the visionary in her fiction.