Product Description

This Guide aims to consolidate and epitomise the re-reading of women’s writing that has gone on in the last twenty-five years. This is an opportunity for stock-taking - a timely project, when so much writing has been rediscovered, reclaimed and republished. 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 day. The book reflects the spread of literacy, the history of colonisation and the development of post-colonial cultures using and changing the English language. The entries are written by contributors from all the countries covered. The result is a work of reference with a unique feeling for the vitality, wealth and diversity of women’s writing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #842325 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

Review
‘This is an admirable collection, put together by an editor who knows so much about women’s writing, from different times, and from all over the world. There are all kinds of surprises and delights here. A book for browsing through, a bedside book.’ Doris Lessing

‘There are few books that one can say, on oath, that this has not been done before but as there has been, thus far, only one Lorna Sage, nothing as learned, as witty and wise as her Guide to Women’s Writing has appeared before the new millennium.’ Gore Vidal

‘This new guide is exhilarating: it ranges deep and wide, weaving a tremendous tapestry of women’s writing, of their lives, scholarship, opinions, imagination, struggles and triumphs. The entries are spirited, acute, packed with fresh insights sparked by the latest research. The culmination of the last two decades’s work in literary history and theory, it should make all those who love English literature exult that, contrary to rumour, the subject is thriving.’ Marina Warner

‘A really useful guide to a body of writing that cuts across traditional literary categories and geographical boundaries.’ David Lodge

‘ … features nearly 2,400 short articles on writers, their writings and the genres to which they contribute … some two dozen entries on genres and sub-types recognize the importance of ‘minor’ prose genres such as the diary, travel writing, and even cookery books, the last sorely neglected in most treatments of women’s writing.’ The Times Literary Supplement

Customer Reviews

An essential reference; clever, witty, reliable and global
An admirably wide ranging and entertaining reference work, which covers all the major and minor writers you'd expect and many that you would not. Entries are invariably reliable, informed, succinct - and often witty. Also covers key works.

Basically I think its a well put together reference guide, which not only informs but entertains. Particularly useful as contributions are sourced from hundreds of experts around the world and it has a satisfyingly broad and irreverent idea of the canon and who should be included. Check, for instance, the range of food writers!

Marvellous.

Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English
This is a sensible, well-written book, with excellent entries on authors, book titles, types of writing, and genres. It is a useful aid to anyone who is particularly interested in women's writing from any of the Anglophone countries of the world.