In one of the most extraordinary memoirs of recent years, Lorna Sage brings alive her girlhood in post-war provincial Britain. From memories of her family and the wounds they inflict upon one another, she tells a tale of thwarted love, failed religion, and the salvation she found in books.

Doris Lessing was one of the most impressive, prolific and vital of twentieth century writers. Her fiction is obsessed with the workings of cultural change and she radically extended the novel's scope - most famously and influentially in The Golden Notebook - by questioning the realist tradition she inherited and the wider social beliefs about self, sexuality and authority which that tradition symbolized. This study, originally published in 1983, surveys her epic output from her early, African writings to her later experiments with space fiction. It traces her struggles to decentre imaginative life and to erase and to redraw the boundaries of our mental maps in favour of values on the margins of the official culture.

Although much of Carter's work is considered part of the contemporary canon, its true strangeness is still only partially understood. Lorna Sage argues that one key to a better understanding of Carter's writings is the extraordinary intelligence with which she read the cultural signs of our times. From structuralism and the study of folk tales in the 1960s to fairy stories, gender politics and the theoretical 'pleasure of the text', which she makes so real in her writing. Carter legitimised the life of fantasy and celebrated the fertility of the female imagination more than any other writer.

Doris Lessing was one of the most impressive, prolific and vital of twentieth century writers. Her fiction is obsessed with the workings of cultural change and she radically extended the novel's scope - most famously and influentially in The Golden Notebook - by questioning the realist tradition she inherited and the wider social beliefs about self, sexuality and authority which that tradition symbolized. This study, originally published in 1983, surveys her epic output from her early, African writings to her later experiments with space fiction. It traces her struggles to decentre imaginative life and to erase and to redraw the boundaries of our mental maps in favour of values on the margins of the official culture.

A sparkling collection of journalism from the critically acclaimed author of BAD BLOOD and MOMENTS OF TRUTH. This selection of the work of Lorna Sage spans the years 1972-2001, when she wrote for the London and New York literary papers and journals, and contains some of her very best pieces. From carefully worked interviews and profiles to the snappiest and deftest of weekly reviews, we can trace the often surprising development of that very distinctive voice and follow its sharpest critical reactions to the important authors and landmark publications of our times. From George Eliot, Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens and Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie, Sage's unmistakable voice is here: clever, hilarious, anarchic, sly, wise, kind, courageous, genial and serious.

This guide to women's writing in English aims to consolidate and epitomize the rereading of women's writing that has gone on in the past twenty-five years. There are entries on writers, on individual texts, and on general terms, genres and movements, all printed in a single alphabetical sequence. The earliest written documents in medieval English (the visionary writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe) are covered in an historical and geographical sweep that takes us up to the present. The entries reflect the spread of literacy, the history of colonization, and the development of postcolonial cultures using and changing the English language. The contributors are chosen from all the countries around the world--and represent academics, novelists, poets, critics, women and men. The result is a work of reference with a feel for the vitality, wealth and diversity of women's writing. Lorna Sage is Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia. She is also a literary journalist whose articles have appeared in such periodicals as the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review

This guide to women's writing in English aims to consolidate and epitomize the rereading of women's writing that has gone on in the past twenty-five years. There are entries on writers, on individual texts, and on general terms, genres and movements, all printed in a single alphabetical sequence. The earliest written documents in medieval English (the visionary writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe) are covered in an historical and geographical sweep that takes us up to the present. The entries reflect the spread of literacy, the history of colonization, and the development of postcolonial cultures using and changing the English language. The contributors are chosen from all the countries around the world--and represent academics, novelists, poets, critics, women and men. The result is a work of reference with a feel for the vitality, wealth and diversity of women's writing. Lorna Sage is Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia. She is also a literary journalist whose articles have appeared in such periodicals as the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review

Fifteen exquisite tales from one of the world'd greatest writers of the short story Innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically short life. Many are set in the author's native New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience - from the blackly comic 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel', and the short, sharp sketch 'Miss Brill', in which a lonely woman's precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed, to the vivid impressionistic evocation of family life in 'At the Bay'. 'All that I write,' Mansfield said, 'all that I am - is on the borders of the sea. It is a kind of playing.'

The Voyage Out (1915) is the story of a rite of passage. When Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship she is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage. Virginia Woolf knew all too well the forms that she was supposed to follow when writing of a young lady's entrance into the world, and she struggled to subvert the conventions, wittily and assiduously, rewriting and revising the novel many times. The finished work is not, on the face of it, a `portrait of the artist'. However, through The Voyage Out readers will discover Woolf as an emerging and original artist: not identified with the heroine, but present everywhere in the social satire and the lyricism and patterning of consciousness. 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.

Go out and get Carter. Get all her fiction, all her fact.' Ali Smith This distinguished volume of essays commemorates the work of Angela Carter. Here her fellow writers, along with an impressive company of critics, disuss the novels, stories and polemics that make her one of the most spellbinding authors of her generation. They trace out the signs of her originality, her daring and her wicked wit, as well as her charm, to produce an indispensable companion to her texts. Contributors are: Guido Almansi, Isobel Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, Elaine Jordan, Ros Kaveney, Hermione Lee, Laura Mulvey, Marc O'Day, Sue Roe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Nicole Ward Jouve, Marina Warner and Kate Webb.

After being left by Mr Mackenzie (and not the other way around) Julia faces facts. Once glamorous and sought-after she is now down-at-heel after a string of unsuccessful affairs and leads a jaded, faded life in a tawdry Paris hotel. Then the maintenance cheques stop and she is forced to change her circumstances. She makes a decision: to return to London to her paralysed mother and worthy, martyred sister. It is to be a new leaf and a new life. But standing on her own is more difficult than she thought - she is restricted by the very existence she has created. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is a brilliant, yet brutal, portrait of a woman struggling to retrieve both life and love.

"The bad blood had missed a generation. You're just like your grandfather, my mother said."

Blood trickles down through every generation, seeps into every marriage. An international bestseller and winner of the Whitbread Biography Award, Bad Blood is a tragicomic memoir of one woman's escape from a claustrophobic childhood in post-World War II Britain and the story of three generations of a family--its triumphs and its darkest secrets.

With wit and a dose of self-deprecating humor, Sage's prose brings to life in vivid detail a period--the 1940s and 1950s--that continues to influence and shape society in the twenty-first century. As a portrait of a family and a young girl's place in it, Bad Blood is unsurpassed.