Is there such a thing as a female literary imagination - a special brand of insight and intuition that characterises women's writing? Is there something about a novel, whether by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte or Doris Lessing, that tells us that it could only have been written by a woman? Do the subject matter, form and style that women choose throw light on the way they think and feel? In this brilliant and highly readable book, originally published in 1976, Patricia Spacks analyses the female view of the world. Juxtaposing - sometimes in startlingly original combination some eighty books written between the seventeenth century and the present day she uses both literary and psychological analysis to explore patterns that recur again and again in the stories women tell - whether about their own lives or the lives of their fictional characters. She dissects female experience in the twentieth century as viewed by an array of writers ranging from Kate Millet to Virginia Woolf; examines the interplay of social passivity and psychic power that dominates characters such as Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre, the altruism that impels Jane Austen's and Mrs Gaskell's heroines, the 'acceptance' of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Ramsey, the personal and social conflicts that beset so many of the adolescent girls that figure in both nineteenth-century and contemporary literature; reveals the complex motives that can be bound up in a women's deliberate choice of the artist's role, as appears in the writings of Isadora Duncan's and Dora Carrington, Marie Bashkirtseff and Mary McCartney - and the surprising forms 'freedom' can take, as for Beatrice Webb in the East End of London or Isak Dinerson in the wilds of Africa... The voices echo and re-echo across the years in fascinating counter-point. Their range is enormous - rebels and reformers, actresses and painters, Society ladies and unknown girls in small towns, novels, poems, memoirs, diaries and letters, both English and American, and alongside classics such as Wuthering Heights and well-known modern works such as The Bell Jar, Patricia Spacks introduces an intriguing selection of relatively unknown writers, such as Napoleon's psychoanalyst great-niece Marie Bonaparte, the Victorian arch-fantasist Mary MacLane and the autobiography of a seventeenth-century Duchess. The Female Imagination is much more than a study of women's writing. It is an inquiry into the nature of female thought, self-expression and experience. As such it should appeal to every educated woman - and to many men too.

A celebratory history and appreciation of the varied, wildly experimental nature of fiction in eighteenth-century England In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding's The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change. Investigating fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential narratives, psychological thrillers, romans a clef, sentimental parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others. These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates that literary history-by no means inexorable-might have taken quite a different course.

Sense and Sensibility (1811) marked the auspicious debut of a novelist identified only as "A Lady." Jane Austen's name has since become as familiar as Shakespeare's, and her tale of two sisters has lost none of its power to delight. Patricia Meyer Spacks guides readers to a deeper appreciation of the richness of Austen's delineation of her heroines, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, as they experience love, romance, and heartbreak. On display again in the editor's running commentary are the wit and light touch that delighted readers of Spacks's Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition. In her notes, Spacks elucidates language and allusions that have become obscure (What are Nabobs? When is rent day?), draws comparisons to Austen's other work and to that of her precursors, and gives an idea of how other critics have seen the novel. In her introduction and annotations, she explores Austen's sympathy with both Elinor and Marianne, the degree to which the sisters share "sense" and "sensibility," and how they must learn from each other. Both manage to achieve security and a degree of happiness by the novel's end. Austen's romance, however, reveals darker overtones, and Spacks does not leave unexamined the issue of the social and psychological restrictions of women in Austen's era. As with other volumes in Harvard's series of Austen novels, Sense and Sensibility: An Annotated Edition comes handsomely illustrated with numerous color reproductions that vividly recreate Austen's world. This will be an especially welcome addition to the library of any Janeite.

This revised Norton Critical Edition is based on the first edition text (dated 1818, but likely issued in late 1817). The editor has spelled out ampersands and made superscript letters lowercased. The novel, which is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory annotations, is followed by the two canceled chapters that comprise Persuasion's original ending. "Backgrounds and Contexts" collects contemporary assessments of Jane Austen as well as materials relating to the social issues of the day. Included are an excerpt from William Hayley's 1785 "Essay on Old Maids"; Austen's letters to Fanny Knight, which reveal her skepticism about marriage as the key to happiness; Henry Austen's memorial tribute to his famous sister; assessments by nineteenth-century critics Julia Kavanagh and Goldwin Smith, who viewed Austen as an unassuming, sheltered, and "feminine" rural writer; and the perspective of Austen's biographer, Geraldine Edith Mitten. The Second Edition emphasizes current critical scholarship, reflecting enormous shifts in our comprehension of Austen's achievement and opening the door to new ways of thinking about Persuasion and its author. For the first time, we can think complexly about Austen living through the Napoleonic Wars on the Continent and experiencing their political repercussions at home-the same as everyone else in England at that time. Four new essays-by Linda Bree, Sidney Gottlieb, John Wiltshire, and David Monaghan-speak to these new perspectives; those by Gottlieb and Monaghan expand the conversation into film adaptations of the novel. A Chronology of Austen's life and work, new to the Second Edition, is included along with an updated Selected Bibliography.

After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn't, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn't to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment. Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen's fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.

This book offers a witty explanation of why boredom both haunts and motivates the literary imagination. Moving from Samuel Johnson to Donald Barthelme, from Jane Austen to Anita Brookner, Spacks shows us at last how we arrived in a postmodern world where boredom is the all-encompassing name we give our discontent. Her book, anything but boring, gives us new insight into the cultural usefulness--and deep interest--of boredom as a state of mind.

After Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood was the most important English female novelist of the early eighteenth century. She also edited several serial newspapers, the most important of which, the Female Spectator, was the first modern periodical written by a woman and addressed to a female audience. This fully annotated collection of articles selected from the Female Spectator includes romantic and satiric fiction, moral essays, and social commentary, covering the broad range of concerns shared by eighteenth-century middle-class women. Perhaps most compelling to a twentieth-century audience is the evidence of what we might be tempted to call feminist awareness.
By no means revolutionary in her attitudes, Haywood nonetheless perceives the inequities of her periods social conditions for women. She offers pragmatic advice, such as how to avoid disastrous marriages, how to deal with wandering husbands, and what kind of education women should seek. The essays also report on a broad range of social actualities, from the craze for tea drinking and the dangers of gossip to the problem of compulsive gambling. They allude to such larger matters as politics, war, and diplomacy, and promote the importance of science and the urgency of developing informed relations with nature.

After Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood was the most important English female novelist of the early eighteenth century. She also edited several serial newspapers, the most important of which, the Female Spectator, was the first modern periodical written by a woman and addressed to a female audience. This fully annotated collection of articles selected from the Female Spectator includes romantic and satiric fiction, moral essays, and social commentary, covering the broad range of concerns shared by eighteenth-century middle-class women. Perhaps most compelling to a twentieth-century audience is the evidence of what we might be tempted to call feminist awareness.
By no means revolutionary in her attitudes, Haywood nonetheless perceives the inequities of her periods social conditions for women. She offers pragmatic advice, such as how to avoid disastrous marriages, how to deal with wandering husbands, and what kind of education women should seek. The essays also report on a broad range of social actualities, from the craze for tea drinking and the dangers of gossip to the problem of compulsive gambling. They allude to such larger matters as politics, war, and diplomacy, and promote the importance of science and the urgency of developing informed relations with nature.

Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity.
In "Privacy," Patricia Meyer Spacks explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. She examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. She considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat--one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, Spacks ultimately shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions.
Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spacks's new work will fascinate anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.

"Desire and Truth" offers a major reassessment of the history of eighteenth-century fiction by showing how plot challenges or reinforces conventional categories of passion and rationality. Arguing that fiction creates and conveys its essential truths through plot, Patricia Meyer Spacks demonstrates that eighteenth-century fiction is both profoundly realistic and consistently daring.