Gender Studies Book List ·

America’s Collectible Cookbooks

The History, the Politics, the Recipes

America's Collectible Cookbooks is a wonderful concoction of gossipy morsels and serious reflection about cookbooks and cookbook authors. Although the names Fannie Merritt Farmer, Eliza Leslie, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Irma Rombauer are familiar to generations of American books, few know how really extraordinary these women were.…

Recollections of Virginia Woolf

In the words of its editor, “This book is not intended to provide an assessment of Virginia Woolf’s work. A great deal has already been written about her novels and critical essays. It is concerned essentially with Virginia Woolf herself: about whom little has been said in print.…

Memoirs of an Indo Woman

Twentieth Century Life in the East Indies and Abroad

The memoirs of Marguérite Schenkhuizen provide an overview of practically the whole of the twentieth century as experienced by persons of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry who lived in the former Dutch East Indies.…

Claribel Alegría and Central American Literature

Critical Essays

These essays examine the multifaceted work of the Central American author whom Latin American literary historians consider precursor of “cultural dialogism” in poetry and fiction. As poet, essayist, journalist, novelist, and writer of “quasi–testimonio,” Alegría’s multiple discourses transgress the boundaries between traditional and postmodern political theories and practices.…

Isak Dinesen

Critical Views

This historical overview of criticism of the famous Danish writer is the first such collection available in English. Composed of selections from major critics and scholars both here and abroad (including Aage Henriksen, Eudora Welty, Curtis Cate, Abdul JanMohamed, and Lionel Trilling, among others) Isak Dinesen would have suited the self-absorbed artist, who so delighted in being continually appropriated and invented within different forms of critical discourse that it became a source of amusement and distraction for her.…

Victorian Scandals

Repressions of Gender And Class

In the popular mind, the word “Victorian” still evokes associations of repression, hypocrisy, and prudery. We persist in thinking that the Victorians were perpetually shocked by everything from minor breaches of domestic decorum to ministry-toppling causes célèbres.…

Not Out of Hate

A Novel of Burma

Not Out of Hate is the first Burmese novel to be translated into English and published outside of Myanmar. It offers unusual insights into the social history of the late colonial period. Set in pre-World War II Burmese society, the story centers on the relationship and marriage of seventeen-year-old Way Way with U Saw Han, a much older Burmese agent for a British trading company.…

Isak Dinesen

The Life and Imagination of a Seducer

Born into a Victorian Danish family, Karen Christentze Dinesen married her second cousin, a high-spirited and philandering baron, and moved to Kenya where she ran a coffee plantation, painted, and wrote.…

Curtain Calls

British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820

“I here and there o’heard a Coxcomb cry,Ah, rot—’tis a Woman’s Comedy.” Thus Aphra Behn ushers in a new era for women in the British Theatre (Sir Patient Fancy, 1678). In the hundred years that were to follow—and exactly those years that Curtain Calls examines—women truly took the theater world by storm.…

Klondike Women

True Tales of the 1897–1898 Gold Rush

Klondike Women is a compelling collection of historical photographs and first-hand accounts of the adventures, challenges, and disappointments of women on the trails to the Klondike gold fields.…

Pompilia

A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning's The Ring and The Book

When Count Guido Franceschini was tried by a Roman court in 1698 for the rape and murder of his young wife Pompilia, he had the church, the state, and “all of sensible Rome” supporting him. Their cynical mandate sprang from the traditional belief that in a patriarchal society the male should wield absolute power, including the power of life and death, over the female.…

Fetter’d or Free?

British Women Novelists, 1670-1815

Traditional literary theory holds that women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century produced works of limited range and value: simple tales of domestic conflict, seduction, and romance. Bringing a broad range of methodologies (historical, textual, post-structuralist, psychological) to bear on the works of Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Smith, Sarah Fielding, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, and others.…

The Bassett Women

Grace McClure has created an even-handed account of the Bassets. Drawing on interviews with surviving family, friends and enemies, on memoirs, and on oral and written records from local libraries, newspapers, and archives she presents believable, life-size characters who respond realistically to the demands of pioneer life.…

Sarah the Priestess

The First Matriarch of Genesis

The only source in which Sarah is mentioned is the Book of Genesis, which contains very few highly selective and rather enigmatic stories dealing with her. On the surface, these stories tell us very little about Sarah, and what they do tell is complicated and confused by the probability that it represents residue surviving from two different written sources based on two independent oral traditions.…

From Sleep Unbound

From Sleep Unbound portrays the life of Samya, an Egyptian woman who is taken at age 15 from her Catholic boarding school and forced into a loveless and humiliating marriage. Eventually sundered from every human attachment, Samya lapses into despair and despondence, and finally an emotionally caused paralysis.…

The Wounded Woman

Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship

This book is an invaluable key to self-understanding. Using examples from her own life and those of her clients, as well as from dreams, fairy tales, myths, films, and literature, Leonard, a Jungian analyst, exposes the wound of the spirit that both men and women of our culture bear – a wound that is grounded in a poor relationship between masculine and feminine principles.…

A Woman Speaks

The Lectures, Seminars, and Interviews of Anaïs Nin

In this book Anaïs Nin speaks with warmth and urgency on those themes which have always been closest to her: relationships, creativity, the struggle for wholeness, the unveiling of woman, the artist as magician, women reconstructing the world, moving from the dream outward, and experiencing our lives to the fullest possible extent.…