Industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries inspired deep fears and divisions throughout England. The era's emergent factory system disrupted traditional patterns and familiar ways of life. Male laborers feared the loss of meaningful work and status within their communities and families. Condemning these transformations, Britain's male writers looked longingly to an idealized past. Its women writers, however, were not so pessimistic about the future. As Susan Zlotnick argues in Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution, women writers foresaw in the industrial revolution the prospect of real improvements. Zlotnick also examines the poetry and fiction produced by working-class men and women. She includes texts written by the Chartists, the largest laboring-class movement in the early nineteenth century, as well as those of the dialect tradition, the popular, commercial literature of the industrial working class after mid-century.

Working Women, Literary Ladies explores the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the United States into wage-earning factory labor and into opportunities for mental and literary development. It is the first book to examine the fascinating exchange between the work and literary spheres for laboring women in the rapidly industrializing America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As women entered the public sphere as workers, their opportunities for intellectual growth expanded, even as those same opportunities were often tightly circumscribed by the factory owners who were providing them. These developments, both institutional and personal, opened up a range of new possibilities for working-class women that profoundly affected women of all classes and the larger social fabric. Cook examines the extraordinary and diverse literary productions of these working women, ranging from their first New England magazine of belles lettres, The Lowell Offering, to Emma Goldman's periodical, Mother Earth; from Lucy Larcom's epic poem of female factory life, An Idyl of Work, to Theresa Malkiel's fictional account of sweatshop workers in New York, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker. This vital new book traces the hopes and tensions generated by the expectations of working-class women as they created a wholly new way of being alive in the world.

This essay collection rediscovers and reassesses a host of still little-known, pre-1914, Welsh women writers. In the last few decades considerable advances have been made towards rediscovering, contextualising, and analysing women’s writing from Wales. The combined influences of the post-1960s women’s movement, the 1990s Welsh devolution successes, and the development of the ‘Four Nations’ school of British literary criticism, have together effected significant advances in the field of Welsh feminist literary studies. This book focuses in particular on: the fifteenth- to eighteenth-century Welsh-language bards, such as Gwerful Mechain, Angharad James, and Marged Dafydd; the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English-language poets, including Katherine Philips, Jane Brereton, Anne Penny, and Anne Hughes; contributors to the Romantic movement in Wales, such as the poets and novelists Mary Robinson and Ann of Swansea; the mid-nineteenth-century protesting voice of polemicists such as Jane Williams (Ysgafell); the Victorian English-language novelists, for example Louisa Matilda Spooner, Anne Beale, Amy Dillwyn, Allen Raine, and Mallt Williams, and their concern with national, class, and gender identities; and early twentieth-century Welsh-language writers engaged with Welsh Home Rule and women’s suffrage issues, such as Gwyneth Vaughan and Eluned Morgan. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

This A-Z reference work provides the first comprehensive reference guide to the wide range of historical writing with which women have been involved, particularly since the Renaissance. The Companion covers biographical writing, travelogue and historical fictions, broadening the concept of history to include the forms of writing with which women have historically engaged. The focus is on women writing in English internationally, but historical and historiographical traditions from beyond the English-speaking world are also examined. Brief biographies of individual writers are included.

This book presents a unique sociological examination of British raciology, focusing on women's literary works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and drawing from a range of academic disciplines, particularly literature, history and cultural studies. Wright traces the emergence of British modernity through the writings of a select group of women writers (including Jane Austen, Hannah More, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Maria Edgeworth) of diverse political and philosophical affiliations, and fills a gap in scholarship on feminist accounts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women's writing.

Innovative and comprehensive coverage of women writers' careers and literary achievements spanning many literary genres during the Victorian period.

Although writing was long considered suitable only for men, there were some brave and clever women who defied the limitations cast upon their gender. Divided by chronological eras, this fascinating collection of biographies will enlighten readers about the women who have crafted the written word to record their surroundings, their imaginations, and their experiences. Also included are chapter notes, a glossary, a further reading section containing books and websites, and an index.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

This book challenges our current critical understanding of the relations between gender, genre, and literary authority in this period.

This volume is the first to identify a significant body of life narratives by working-class women and to demonstrate their inherent literary significance. Placing each memoir within its generic, historical, and biographical context, this book traces the shifts in such writings over time, examines the circumstances which enabled working-class women authors to publish their life stories, and places these memoirs within a wider autobiographical tradition. Additionally, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women enables readers to appreciate the clear-sightedness, directness, and poignancy of these works.