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Women's Literature — Babel Nexus Index

Literature / Women Writers & the Female Tradition

A Level II literature chamber of the Babel Nexus Index · 36 primary public-domain works.

What Women's Literature argues

  • This is the hexagonal gallery of Women's Literature — the long tradition of women writing themselves into the record, from Christine de Pizan's medieval city built of women's deeds to Virginia Woolf's demand for five hundred pounds a year and a room of one's own. It is a floor of firsts won against the grain: the first English professional woman writer and the first published poet of the American colonies.
  • One shelf holds the argument: Mary Scott's versified roll-call of learned women, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication, Mary Hays's six-volume Female Biography, Sarah Josepha Hale's Woman's Record, Ida B. Wells's Southern Horrors, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Woman's Bible — three centuries of the case, made in poetry, polemic, and biography, that women's minds and lives matter.
  • Another shelf holds the novel, where women came to rule: Behn's Oroonoko, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the Brontë sisters' twin thunderclaps of 1847, Gaskell, Eliot's Middlemarch, Chopin's Awakening, Wharton, Schreiner, Larsen's Passing, and Montgomery's Blue Castle — beside the poets Bradstreet, Barrett Browning, Rossetti, and Dickinson, and the testimony of Harriet Jacobs.
  • Each card carries an authentic public-domain likeness of its author where one survives — Branwell Brontë's portraits of his sisters, Cassandra Austen's sketch of Jane, the Beresford photograph of Woolf — or an honest title-page scan where none does. All thirty-four works are in the public domain.

Primary works in Women's Literature (36)

Chambers connected to Women's Literature

  • First Novels — Women built the novel. From Behn's Oroonoko through Austen, the Brontës, and Eliot, the form the first novelists invented became the instrument women used to anatomize society — and to enter literature's front rank.
  • Poetry — The tradition begins in verse. Bradstreet was colonial America's first published poet, and Barrett Browning, Rossetti, and Dickinson stand among the century's greatest lyric voices.
  • Letters and Essays — The argument runs through reflective prose. Wollstonecraft's Vindication and Woolf's A Room of One's Own belong to the essay's great tradition — the polemic and the meditation as instruments of change.