When first published in 1982, A LITERATURE OF THEIR OWN quickly set the stage fo
r the creative explosion of feminist literary studies that transformed the field
in the 1980s. Launching a major new area for literary investigation, the book u
ncovered the long but neglected tradition of women writers and the development o
f their fiction from the 1800s onwards. It includes assessments of famous writer
s such as the Brontes, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Drabble and Doris
Lessing, but also presents critical appraisals of Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton
and Sarah Grand - to name but a few of those prolific and successful Victorian n
ovelists - once household names, now largely forgotten.
