An unprecedented literary landmark: the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to the present. In a narrative of immense scope and fascination, here are more than 250 female writers, including the famous—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison, among others—and the little known, from the early American bestselling novelist Catherine Sedgwick to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Susan Glaspell. Showalter integrates women’s contributions into our nation’s literary heritage with brilliance and flair, making the case for the unfairly overlooked and putting the overrated firmly in their place.

On a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Greenwich Village bohemians gathered in the summer of 1916, Susan Glaspell was inspired by a sensational murder trial to write Trifles, a play about two women who hide a Midwestern farm wife's motive for murdering her abusive husband. Following successful productions of the play, Glaspell became the "mother of American drama." Her short story version of Trifles, "A Jury of Her Peers," reached an unprecedented one million readers in 1917. The play and the story have since been taught in classrooms across America and Trifles is regularly revived on stages around the world. This collection of fresh essays celebrates the centennial of Trifles and "A Jury of Her Peers," with departures from established Glaspell scholarship. Interviews with theater people are included along with two original works inspired by Glaspell's iconic writings.

As a little girl climbs off a school bus on the Upper East Side of New York, a man named Trent rushes from the shadows to stab her viciously, instantly becoming the city's latest pariah and setting into motion an increasingly bizarre chain of occurrences. At one end of the chain is Sybylla Muldoon, the Legal Aid attorney who must somehow overcome eyewitness accounts, devastating forensic evidence, and the brutal disfigurement of an innocent child in her struggle to defend Trent; at the other is the mystery of why a previously peaceful and rational man should suddenly commit such an abhorrent crime. Sybylla's client may be inescapably guilty of the act, but everything about the case feels unaccountably wrong. Raised to argue both sides of anything by her father, a conservative judge whom she adores even as she rejects his politics, Sybylla is committed to the principles of public defense but growing increasingly weary in its practice. Now as she readies Trent's case for trial, Sybylla makes a series of seemingly unrelated discoveries that bind together a thriving trial consulting firm dealing exclusively with conservative prosecuting attorneys, a pattern of unnoticed abductions among New York's homeless, a long-abandoned avenue of medical research, and Sam, Sybylla's new colleague at Legal Aid whom she falls for but can't quite trust. In the end, Trent's mystery leads her to the very summit of the American legal system—the confirmation hearings of a Supreme Court nominee—and to the heart of her own family history, until Sybylla must reconsider virtually everything she believes she knows about her own life. With its captivating protagonist and its timely consideration of juries, trial consultants, and that elusive notion, justice, A Jury of Her Peers is a chilling novel about the law—and those who seek to corrupt it.

How well does our jury system work, and does trial by jury guarantee ustice to those brought before it? This unique collection of essays offers historical, cultural and political insight into the role of juries, and in particular into the way the system impacts on different members of Australian society.

The casebook provides detailed information on procedure. It includes selected cases designed to illustrate the development of a body of law on a particular subject. Text and explanatory materials designed for law study accompany the cases.