Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Simone de Beauvoir
-
Standard Name: Beauvoir, Simone de
Birth Name: Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Nickname: Castor
Frenchwoman SB
has high standing as a philosopher of the twentieth-century existentialist school and is respected as a commentator on political and social issues (in effect, a contemporary historian), a novelist, and an autobiographer. She also published and had produced a play. But her outstanding (though lastingly controversial) achievement is her book on women, entitled in English The Second Sex, a foundational text for modern feminism.
But it was not until she became a college student in her forties that she discovered feminism and women's writing, in a series that led her from Hannah Arendt
to Simone de Beauvoir
and then...
Reception
Hildegarde of Bingen
In recent times she has made a rapid transition from being unknown to being fashionable for her music and moderately well known for her writings. Her letters were edited in English translation in 1994 and...
Reception
Anne Conway
Two of AC
's most recent editors, Coudert
and Corse
, more forcefully assert that hers is the most interesting and original philosophical treatise written by a woman in the seventeenth century
Conway, Anne. “Introduction”. The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, edited by Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. vii - xxxiii.
xxix
and that...
Textual Features
Adrienne Rich
These poems abandon AR
's former regular metres for free verse, as they abandon decorum for outspoken personal expression about the struggle necessary to be a thinking woman rather than a good girl.
qtd. in
O’Mahoney, John. “Poet and Pioneer: Adrienne Rich”. The Guardian, 15 June 2002, pp. Review 20 - 3.
22
Textual Production
Ali Smith
In addition to these collaborative works, AS
has published an anthology of her own favourite texts, those she sees as essential to her development as a writer. Published twice under different titles—The Reader (2006)...
Textual Production
Hannah Arendt
It was ten years since she had sketched out parts of this book, as what she then called a kind of second volume of The Human Condition.
qtd. in
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World. Second Edition, Yale University Press, 2004.
420
Its own third volume, Judging...
Textual Production
Winsome Pinnock
This was the first play that WP
wrote, aged twenty-three. Though it is largely a play about women, it grew from interviews she did with veterans from the Falklands War, when she felt that the...
The essays comprising part one cover such topics as the 1968 student protests in Paris, the writer Marguerite Yourcenar
, and the case of Gabrielle Russier
, while the reviews of part two take...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Germaine Greer
The introduction begins, It is not quite forty years since eliminating menopause was first mooted.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin, 1992.
1
It moves swiftly into the concept of a fear or hatred of old women, which Greer names anophobia.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin, 1992.
2
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Julia Kristeva
The first of these books addresses Freud
's concept of revolt against the fathers as the basis of individual maturation and independence, and seeks by looking at the lives of three distinguished modern social rebels...
