With her debut novel about one girl’s experience as a spelling bee champion, Myla Goldberg explores the unraveling of a family. Bee Season is the story of the Naumanns, a deeply fractured and emotionally stunted family in which no one… Read More ›
feminist literature
Analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City
Volume five in the Children of Violence series, this novel follows Landlocked (1965) and concludes the adventures of Martha Quest in an apocalyptic vision of a future in which human beings overcome the limitations of communication and mutual understanding through… Read More ›
Analysis of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls
This trilogy was published in a single volume with added material (Epilogue) in 1986; it originally appeared as the separate volumes The Country Girls (1960), which was the author’s first published novel; The Lonely Girl (1962); and Girls in Their… Read More ›
Analysis of Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence
The five volumes in this series include Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). Taking the series as a whole, critics rank this work as among the… Read More ›
Analysis of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin
Awarded the Booker Prize for 2000, this novel is an example of both postmodernism and feminism and includes elements of science fiction in a complex, multilayered plot rooted in the traditions of realism. The first-person narrator, Iris Chase Griffen, writes… Read More ›
Analysis of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm
While Olive Schreiner was born and lived for years in South Africa, she remains important to the British writing tradition as the first colonial novelist held important by British readers. She brought a manuscript with her when, at age 26,… Read More ›
Analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her first novel, Mary: A Fiction, to express her most personal beliefs. An autobiographical work, Mary has been evaluated by later critics as too sentimental an expression to represent high-quality writing, and that inferiority in expression results… Read More ›
Analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is the story of the protagonist’s quest, not for material treasure, but rather for equality and selfhood. Equally important, Jane seeks the proper manner to rebel against men who seek to dominate and control her, eventually… Read More ›
Analysis of Fanny Burney’s Evelina
Fanny Burney published her first work, Evelina, anonymously, basing it on a piece of juvenilia titled The History of Caroline Evelyn, which she had destroyed on the advice of her stepmother. As an account of the unhappy life of Evelina’s… Read More ›
Analysis of Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline
Like all Charlotte Smith’s novels, her first, Emmeline, contained strong autobiographical elements. Through fiction, Smith found a way to protest her situation as mother to a large brood of children with a profligate husband who had abandoned the family. According… Read More ›
Analysis of George Meredith Diana of the Crossways
When George Meredith published his 1885 novel, Diana of the Crossways, women readers welcomed his heroine as representative of recent social reforms. The novel reflects its era’s obsessive interest in the breakdown of standards, which had been part of a… Read More ›
Analysis of George Gissing’s Demos: A Story of English Socialism
Reflective of his general focus on hard work as an anecdote to failure and poverty, George Gissing’s Demos: A Story of English Socialism blasts socialism as an ideal never to be realized, due to the greed of its leaders. He… Read More ›
Analysis of Mona Caird’s Daughters of Danaus
Mona Caird revealed her strong feminist leanings in all her writings, both fiction and nonfiction. Her 1894 novel, Daughters of Danaus, contained all the themes she stressed in her essays, including a need for female independence, both physical and emotional,… Read More ›
Analysis of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa
Samuel Richardson published his second novel in seven volumes, the first two in 1747, and the remaining five the next year. Like his first work, Pamela (1740), Clarissa is an epistolary novel, made up of letters written between characters. While… Read More ›
Analysis of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey
Anne Brontë’s autobiographical novel about a young woman governess features themes of social injustice, class consciousness, education, and isolation. Brontë’s first-person narrative alerts readers in its opening sentence that, by presenting a “history,” it intends to instruct and will be… Read More ›
Analysis of Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray
When Amelia Opie (1769-1853), the most popular novelist of her day, decided to write Adeline Mowbray, based loosely on the tumultuous public relationship of her acquaintances William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, she signaled readers with her subtitle that the female… Read More ›
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