Description

Interest in works written by women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is growing. Many of these works are now being reprinted and studied in literature courses as well as women's studies courses. British Women Writers, 1700-1850 serves as a guide to these authors, their works, and the writing about them. It mentions accessible editions of the works, recent bibliographies of the authors and scholarship on these writers and their works. Topical chapters and subheadings help the researcher in his or her study. They include outlines of political and literary events in England from 1700 to 1850; discussions of the change in cultural climate from the wit, satire, and intellectualism of the Neoclassic Age through the philanthropists of the Victorian Age; the tension between self-expression and the culture's insistence that such self-expression was unseemly in a woman; discussions of current criticism of women's novels, poetry, drama, and other writing with a descriptive bibliography of the most helpful works; and biographical information for individual women authors, born after 1700 in Great Britain, whose most significant work was done by 1850. Subject and author indexes complete the book.