Author Description

Encompassing the widest range of British women's writing available in a single volume--from Julian of Norwich and Aphra Behn to Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson--this invaluable guide offers entries on 400 writers from the fourteenth century to the present. Ideal for beginners, this outstanding reference source covers not only great female novelists, poets, and playwrights, but the diarists, letter writers, mystics, historians, classical scholars, scientists, and travel writers who have penned their names into the stone of history. It also includes entries on non-British writers who have influenced the literary scene, such as Sylvia Plath. Concise, informative, and well-organized, each entry offers an outline of each women's life, her major publications, contemporary critical reception, as well as an assessment of her work. And also included are detailed suggestions for further reading and a general bibliography of woman's writing.