"A remarkable and brave novel. I was astonished at the acute angle of vision and the fullness of sympathy toward both men and women--and children."--Carol Shields

An ahead-of-its-time novel about an unhappy and obsessively house-proud mother of three whose husband is disabled, leaving her free to work in a department store and him to be a Montessori father. One of the ten best-selling novels of 1924 and made into a (silent) film, it was singled out by Elaine Showalter in her recent book on American women writers and was included in the collection Five Hundred Great Books by Women.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958) was one of America's best-known novelists. The Home-Maker has been a bestseller for Persephone Books in the United Kingdom, and with this edition it will be widely available in the United States.

'I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship.' Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth - four "little women" enduring hardships and enjoying adventures in Civil War New England The charming story of the March sisters, Little Women has been adored by generations. Readers have rooted for Laurie in his pursuit of Jo's hand, cried over little Beth's death, and dreamed of travelling through Europe with old Aunt March and Amy. Future writers have found inspiration in Jo's devotion to her writing. In this simple, enthralling tale, both parts of which are included here, Louisa May Alcott has created four of American literature's most beloved women. The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

'One of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century' Michael Cunningham Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Smith's day interweaves with that of Clarissa and her friends, their lives converging as the party reaches its glittering climax. Virginia Woolf's masterly novel, in which she perfected the interior monologue, brings past, present and future together on one momentous day in June 1923. Edited by Stella McNichol with an Introduction and Notes by Elaine Showalter.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth - four "little women" enduring hardships and enjoying adventures in Civil War New England The charming story of the March sisters, Little Women has been adored by generations. Readers have rooted for Laurie in his pursuit of Jo's hand, cried over little Beth's death, and dreamed of traveling through Europe with old Aunt March and Amy. Future writers have found inspiration in Jo's devotion to her writing. In this simple, enthralling tale, both parts of which are included here, Louisa May Alcott has created four of American literature's most beloved women.

`It was not so much his great height that marked him ... it was the careless powerful look that he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain.' Set against the bleak winter landscape of New England, Ethan Frome tells the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this short novel's powerful and engrossing drama, Edith Wharton constructed her least characteristic and most celebrated book. In its unyielding and shocking pessimism, its bleak demonstration of tragic waste, it is a masterpiece of psychological and emotional realism. In her introduction the distinguished critic Elaine Showalter discusses the background to the novel's composition and the reasons for its enduring success. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The fascinating letters between Vera Brittain and Winifred Hotlby, written from 1920 to 1935, tell the story of an extraordinary friendship that created a model for a new kind of independent woman, after the First World War. This is a literary relationship that began when the women met at Somerville, Cambridge and lasted until Winifred's early death at the age of 35. The letters that kept Vera Brittain and Winifred 'continuously together' shows us the inner life of two women who wished to make their mark on the world. They wrote about their ambitions and encouraged and advised each other. But there were also periods when they were literary rivals (Winifred landed a book deal first) and the letters show them negotiating envy and self-doubt. It was at times an uneven relationship: Vera, five years older, married and had two children during this period, and her Testament of Youth became a bestseller, while Winifred remained a single woman with an adventurous spirit that took her travelling and as one of Holtby's characters says in her famous novel, South Riding: 'I am spinster and I am going to spin!' Vera helped Winifred form her ideology - 'You made me' and Winifred shored up Vera, including managing her husband and children (who were devoted to Winifred) and was Vera's intellectual sounding board. A social history, a portrait of a time between the wars and a dramatic, touching story, it has all the hallmarks of honest female friendship: one not without friction and with its own delicate co-dependency but it was life enhancing and life changing for them both. After Winifred's death Vera said of their letters that they showed 'that loyalty and affection between women - not only unsung but mocked, belittled - is a noble relationship.'

Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth - four "little women" enduring hardships and enjoying adventures in Civil War New England The charming story of the March sisters, Little Women has been adored by generations. Readers have rooted for Laurie in his pursuit of Jo's hand, cried over little Beth's death, and dreamed of traveling through Europe with old Aunt March and Amy. Future writers have found inspiration in Jo's devotion to her writing. In this simple, enthralling tale, both parts of which are included here, Louisa May Alcott has created four of American literature's most beloved women. In her enlightening, thoughtful introduction, Elaine Showalter discusses Louisa May Alcott's influences, and her aspirations for Little Women, as well as the impact the novel has had on such women writers as Joyce Carol Oates and Cynthia Ozick.

"I have been a character in academic fiction at least twice," Elaine Showalter writes, "once a voluptuous, promiscuous, drug-addicted bohemian, once a prudish, dumpy, judgmental frump. I hope I am not too easily identified in either of these guises . . . although I can tell you that I preferred being cast as the luscious Concord grape to my role as the withered prune." In the days before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice columns for graduate students and junior faculty, there were academic novels teaching us how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think, write, love, and (more than occasionally) solve murders. If many of these books are wildly funny, others paint pictures of failure and pain, of lives wasted or destroyed. Like the suburbs, Elaine Showalter notes, the campus can be the site of pastoral and refuge. But even ivory towers can be structurally unsound, or at least built with glass ceilings. Though we love to read about them, all is not well in the faculty towers, and the situation has been worsening. In Faculty Towers, Showalter takes a personal look at the ways novels about the academy have charted changes in the university and society since 1950. With her readings of C. P. Snow's idealized world of Cambridge dons, the globe-trotting antics of David Lodge's Morris Zapp, the sleuthing Kate Fansler in Amanda Cross's best-selling mystery series, or the recent spate of bitter novels in which narratives of sexual harassment seem to serve as fables of power, anger, and desire, Showalter holds a mirror up to the world she has inhabited over the course of a distinguished and often controversial career.

When first published in 1982, 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 Brontes, 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 edition, revised and expanded in 1997, contains an introductory chapter surveying the book's reception as well as a postscript chapter celebrating the legacy of feminism and feminist criticism in the efflorescence of contemporary British fiction by women.

The novel that first made Willa Cather famous--a powerfully mythic tale of the American frontier told through the life of one extraordinary woman--in a handsome hardcover volume.
No other work of fiction so vividly evokes the harsh beauty and epic sweep of the Nebraska prairies that Cather knew and loved. The heroine of "O Pioneers , "Alexandra Bergson, is a young Swedish immigrant at the turn of the twentieth century who inherits her father's windblasted land and, through years of hard work, turns it into a prosperous farm. Fiercely independent, Alexandra sacrifices love and companionship in her passionate devotion to the land, until tragedy strikes and brings with it the chance for a new life.
One of our most beloved classics, one of the great heroines of American literature.

In France between 1641 and 1782 the romance developed into the novel. Mr. Showalter's intensive study of the novel, particularly during the critical period 1700-1720, shows that an important movement toward nineteenth century realism was taking place. To trace this development the author has selected five phenomena--time, space, names, money, and the narrator--and follows their treatment throughout the period to show why romance tended toward the novel. To show the working-out of these ideas there is a detailed analysis of one novel, Robert Challe's Les Illustres Francoises, which can be precisely located in the chain of literary influence. Its central theme of the individual in conflict with society was well suited to the forms available to the eighteenth century novelist. Consequently it appears repeatedly in important novels of the period, showing that the evolutionary process worked to some degree even on subject matter. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

One of the great novels of American girlhood, Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs (1912) follows the adventures of an orphan named Judy Abbott, whose letters to her anonymous male benefactor trace her development as an independent thinker and writer. Its sequel, Dear Enemy (1915), follows the progress of Judy's former orphanage, now run by her friend Sallie McBride, who struggles to give her young charges hope and a new life. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

These fascinating letters between Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby tell the story of an extraordinary friendship. 'A beautiful collection' Daisy Dunn, Sunday Times 'Completely fascinating' Rachel Cooke, Observer 'Lively, perceptive and immaculately edited' Miranda Seymour, Literary Review 'A moving, unvarnished chronicle of intellectual comradeship' Sarah Watling, Telegraph A literary relationship that began when the women met at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1919, it lasted until Winifred's early death at the age of thirty-seven. The letters, written from 1920 to 1935, kept them 'continuously together', and show us the life of two pioneers who wished to make their mark as writers and campaigners. Each encouraged and advised the other. However, there were periods when they were literary rivals. Winifred landed a book deal first; Vera produced an international bestseller with Testament of Youth; and the letters show them negotiating envy and self-doubt. It was at times an uneven relationship: Vera, more than four years older, was married and had two children during this period, while Winifred, a single woman with an adventurous spirit, travelled and made a wide range of friends. As the heroine of her novel South Riding says, 'I was born to be a spinster and by God, I'm going to spin!' Vera decisively influenced Winifred's passion for feminism and peace; 'You made me,' Winifred told her. In turn, Winifred, who took care of Vera's children and placated her husband, gave Vera crucial intellectual and emotional support, fiercely believing in her literary gifts. A portrait of the inter-war years and a dramatic, touching and ultimately tragic story, the letters have the hallmarks of honest female friendship: not without friction and with its own delicate co-dependency, but life-changing for them both.

In this informative, timely and often harrowing study, Elaine Showalter demonstrates how cultural ideas about 'proper' feminine behaviour have shaped the definition and treatment of female insanity for 150 years, and given mental disorder in women specifically sexual connotations. Along with vivid portraits of the men who dominated psychiatry, and descriptions of the therapeutic practices that were used to bring women 'to their senses', she draws on diaries and narratives by inmates, and fiction from Mary Wollstonecraft to Doris Lessing, to supply a cultural perspective usually missing from studies of mental illness. Highly original and beautifully written, The Female Malady is a vital counter-interpretation of madness in women, showing how it is a consequence of, rather than a deviation from, the traditional female role.

When first published in 1977, "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 in England. A classic of feminist criticism, its impact continues to be felt today.

This revised and expanded edition contains a new introductory chapter surveying the book's reception and a new postscript chapter celebrating the legacy of feminism and feminist criticism in the efflorescence of contemporary British fiction by women.

Winner of the National Book Award and in print for more than thirty years, them ranks as one of the most masterly portraits of postwar America ever written by a novelist. Including several new pages and text substantially revised and updated by the author, this Modern Library edition is the most current and accurate version available of Oates' seminal work.
A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates' vision of the American fam-ily--broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society--men and women, mothers and children--whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined. Alfred Kazin called her subject "the sheer rich chaos of American life." The Nation wrote, "When Miss Oates' potent, life-gripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are preeminently in them, she is a prodigious writer."
In addition to the text revisions, this--new edition contains an Afterword by the author and a new Introduction by Greg Johnson, Oates' biographer and the author of two monographs on the work of Joyce Carol Oates.

"From the Hardcover edition.

At the turn of the century, short stories by- and often about- 'New Women' flooded the pages of English and American magazines like The Yellow Book, The Savoy, Atlantic Monthly and Harpers. This daring new fiction, often innovative in form, and courageous in its candid literary aspiration, shocked Victorian critics who parodied the experimental stories in Punch as symptoms of fin de siecle decadence, or denounced the authors as 'literary degenerates' or 'erotomaniacs.' This collection brings together twenty of the most original and important stories, including such little-known writers as Victoria Cross, George Egerton, Vernon Lee, Constance Fenimore Wollson and Charlotte Mew. Ranging from the lyrical to the Gothic, and frequently dealing with the conflicts of women artists, the short fiction of the fin de siecle is the missing link between the Golden Age of Victorianism women writers and the new era of feminist modernism.

This provocative and illuminating book charts the persistence of a cultural phenomenon. Tales of alien abduction, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, and the resurgence of repressed memories in psychotherapy are just a few of the signs that we live in an age of hysterical epidemics.

As Elaine Showalter demonstrates, the triumphs of the therapeutic society have not been able to prevent the appearance of hysterical disorders, imaginary illnesses, rumor panics, and pseudomemories that mark the end of the millenium.

Like the witch-hunts of the 1690s and the hypnotic cures of the 1980s, the hysterical syndromes of the 1990s reflect the fears and anxieties of a culture on the edge of change. Showalter highlights the full range of contemporary syndromes and draws connections to earlier times and settings, showing that hysterias mutate and are renamed; under the right circumstances, everyone is susceptible.

Today, hysterical epidemics are not spread by viruses or vapors but by stories, narratives Showalter calls hystories that are created "in the interaction of troubled patients and sympathetic therapists... circulated through self-help books, articles in newspapers and magazines, TV talk shows, popular films, the Internet, even literary criticism." Though popular stereotypes of hysteria are still stigmatizing, largely because of their associations with women, many of the most recent manifestations receive respectful and widespread coverage. In an age skeptical of Freud and the power of unconscious desires and conflicts, personal troubles are blamed on everything from devil-worshipping sadists to conspiring governments. The result is the potential for paranoia and ignorance on a massive scale.

Skillfully surveying the condition of hysteria -- its causes, cures, famous patients, and doctors -- in the twentieth century, Showalter also looks at literature, drama, and feminist representations of the hysterical. Hysterias, she shows, are always with us, a kind of collective coping mechanism for changing times; all that differs are names and labels, and at times of crisis, individual hysterias can become contagious.

Insightful and sensitive, filled with fascinating new perspectives on a culture saturated with syndromes of every sort, "Hystories" is a gift of good sense from one of our best critics.

"Modern American Women Writers" is a rich examination of how the lives of thirty-two of America's leading writers shaped the literature they produced. The essays in this book are by the best scholars in the field of women's studies and combine illuminating biographical detail with thoughtful discussions of each author's work. Based on the acclaimed hardcover, this concise edition of "Modern American Women Writers" is a unique look at a century of women's contributions to the American literary tradition. As the distinguished feminist critic Elaine Showalter says in the introduction, "Women have revised the fundamental themes and conventions of American literature, including its myths of individuality, community, language, and the frontier. Feminine imagination and feminine energy are part of our cultural heritage, and any history of American literature that excludes women's contribution cannot be complete."

Joyce Carol Oates's prize-winning story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" takes up troubling subjects that continue to occupy her in her fiction: the romantic longings and limited options of adolescent women; the tensions between mothers and daughters; the sexual victimization of women; and the American obsession with violence. Inspired by a magazine story about a serial killer, its remarkable portrait of the dreamy teenager Connie has made it a feminist classic. Connie's life anticipates the emergence of American society from the social innocence of the fifties into the harsher contemporary realities of war, random violence, and crime. The story was the basis for the movie Smooth Talk, which became the subject of much feminist debate. This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of Oates's life, and authoritative text of "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" an essay by Oates on Smooth Talk, the original Life article about the serial killer, ten critical essays (including two about the film), and a bibliography. The contributors are Brenda O. Daly, Christina Marsden Gillis, Don Moser, Tom Quirk, B. Ruby Rich, R.J.R. Rockwood, Larry Rubin, Gretchen Schultz, Marie Mitchell Oleson Urbanski, Joyce M. Wegs, and Joan D. Winslow. Elaine Showalter is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She is the author and editor of many books on women's writing, including Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing. A volume in the Women Writers: Texts and Contexts Series.