Women's Literature in English

Explore medieval texts featuring female characters and women writers, from Anglo-Saxon monasteries and vellum to Beowulf, Judith, and Chaucer's Wife of Bath.

Explore the Anglo-Saxon Judith in the Nowell Codex alongside Beowulf: a noble, beautiful warrior who defeats Holofernes, blending pre-Christian heroism with Christian virtue.

Highlight Julian of Norwich as the first named female English writer and anchoress. Reveal her big idea in Revelations of Divine Love: that all will be well.

Explore Margery Kempe, author of the first English autobiography. Learn how her visions, pilgrimages, and public tears reveal medieval mysticism and women's writing.

Elizabeth I, the virgin queen and patron of the arts, steered England through the Armada and fostered an Elizabethan era with Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Spenser.

Explore how Elizabeth I patronized theatre, challenged Puritan bans, and opened plays to the masses, while the Globe housed Lord Chamberlain's Men and Shakespeare's works.

Examine how Renaissance writers depict women, focusing on Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Spenser, and explore the period's shifting roles of women in English literature.

Explore restoration literature's liberal turn: the theatre's revival, emergence of female dramatists like Aphra Behn, satire and heroic couplets, and a shift to broader European influence.

Aphra Behn, restoration's first professional female writer, shapes political and gender discourse through Oroonoko and The Rover, now read as proto-feminist royalist critique.

Explore the cult of sensibility, its extremes of emotion, and its role as a stepping stone to romanticism, with examples from Pamela, Sense and Sensibility, and gothic fiction.

Ann Radcliffe pioneered Gothic fiction in the 1790s, turning it into a respectable art form by rationalizing the supernatural in the archetypal novel the mysteries of Udolpho.

Meet Maria Edgeworth, a prolific Anglo-Irish novelist whose Castle Rackrent helped shape the modern novel, advancing education for women and social reform across Ireland and Britain.

Discover Frances Burney, a major satirist and realist whose Evelina and the Wanderer shaped Jane Austen, while her journals record women's lives, including a mastectomy without anesthetic.

Jane Austen emerges as a realist who critiques sensibility and portrays contemporary English society through domestic life and marriage, exemplified by Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.

Mary Shelley, a second-generation Romantic and author of Frankenstein, challenges male Enlightenment ideals with a Gothic, feminist-inflected narrative and a proto-science fiction classic.

Trace the rise of Queen Victoria and the British Empire, and how Victorian morality, technology, and literary giants from Dickens to Bronte and Tennyson shape women's literature in English.

Explore the Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—through their novels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and their romantic inspirations, gothic realism, and themes of domestic violence.

Mary Ann Evans’s path to George Eliot, a feminist icon to some and hypocrite to others, and explore Middlemarch and Silas Marner through realism and social reform.

Explore Louisa May Alcott, a proto feminist and abolitionist, author of Little Women and sequels, drawing on transcendentalist influences and her Concord family to explore women's roles in postwar America.

The lecture explains selecting diverse women writers across England and beyond, highlighting Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Circe and the Red Tent, plus screenwriting.

Explore Agatha Christie, the best-selling fiction writer, famed for Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, whose 66 mystery novels and plays shaped the whodunnit and modern crime fiction.

Maya Angelou's life and work unfold through poetry, autobiography, and civil rights activism, from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to the themes of racism, gender, travel, and family.

Explore Sylvia Plath’s life and work, from The Colossus and Ariel to The Bell Jar, and examine her battles with depression and the biographical context of her poetry.

Trace Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize–winning career and explore her landmark works Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Song of Solomon, through themes of trauma, motherhood, and memory in slavery.

Explore JK Rowling’s rags-to-riches life, the Harry Potter saga, and her Lumos charity, while examining gender controversy and themes of identity and prejudice.

Explore Margaret Atwood's life and work, a poet, novelist, critic, activist and inventor, whose books from The Handmaid's Tale to The Penelopiad address feminism, environment, and dystopian futures.

Trace the surge of retelling ancient, often patriarchal, stories from a female perspective, from Diamant's Red Tent to Madeline Miller's Cersei, and discuss milestones like Hamnet and the Penelopiad.

Explore Anita Diamant's 1997 novel The Red Tent, telling Dana's life through the four mothers, highlighting milestones of birth, puberty, menstruation, and menopause in a feminist biblical retelling.

Explore Madeline Miller’s feminist retelling of the Odyssey from Cersei’s perspective, told in present tense and first person, with realistic characters in Greek mythology.

Explore the trend of reinterpreting famous literary figures from a female perspective, with Morgan le Fay, Margery Kempe, Lady Macbeth, and present-tense first-person prose.

Explore how Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, with Peter Jackson, shaped Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings through script writing for three films, balancing language, exposition, and fan expectations.

Examine Sofia Coppola’s screenwriting and directing through Lost in Translation, a modernist, dialogue-driven film about femininity and loneliness, featuring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson and winning Best Original Screenplay.

Encourage continued writing and engagement after the women in literature course, explore further reading, join the course's Facebook group, and ask questions in the Q&A as updates roll in.