QPB Anthology of Women's Writing - Softcover

The QPB Anthology of Women's Writing showcases the strongest and most beautifully written women's fiction, poetry, memoir, letters, and essays. The authors are a brilliant array of the finest women writers past and present--from Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen to Elizabeth Bishop and Muriel Spark, from Anne Bradstreet and Margaret Atwood to Stevie Smith and Maya Angelou. Their writings span centuries, countries, and sensibilities, and together represent simply the best in women's literature.

Editor Susan Cahill, well known for such widely respected books as Women and Fiction, Wise Women, and Desiring Italy, has chosen the work of sixty-nine writers who have a "rich understanding of our particular female identities" and who, at times, "undertake their work as a simultaneous act of resistance of oppression and a determined self-affirmation." There's the work of the underappreciated New Yorker fiction writer Maeve Brennan; Eudora Welty's classic story "A Worn Path"; Gish Jen's wonderful "Who's Irish?" (and Lorrie Moore's equally wonderful "You're Ugly, Too"); Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize speech; and much more. Cahill also doesn't shy from the political, including different accounts of slavery from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet A. Jacobs, and Frances E. W. Harper, with further discussion in her notes about the twentieth-century socioeconomic shifts in woemn's lives that led to a change in what they were writing.

Leslie Marmon Silko, Julian of Norwich, Margaret Fuller, Alice Walker, Joyce Carol Oates, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson. They all provide, says Cahill, "the pleasure of women's voices. In their elegant harmonies and their bold dissonance, they are at once serious and thrilling." This exclusive QPB edition is a not-to-to-missed treat, and an indispensable addition to your library.