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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.