Written By Herself

"...substantial contribution to African-American Studies and women's studies." --Mississippi Quarterly "A bravura performance by an accomplished scholar... it strikes a perfect balance between insightful literary analysis and historical investigation." --Eighteenth-Century Studies "... an impressive study of a wide range of writers.... Foster's work is both scholarly and accessible. Her prose is economical and direct, making this book enjoyable as well as instructive." --Belles Lettres "... an impressively wide-ranging discussion of texts and contexts... " --Signs "Foster has written a fine book that provides the reader with a context for understanding the importance of the written word for women who chose to 'set the record straight'." --Journal of American History "... fascinating, meticulously researched... Likely to prove seminal in the field... highly recommended... " --Library Journal " Written by Herself comprises a volume of remarkable female characters whose desires for social change often made them catalysts for spiritual awakening in their own times." --MultiCultural Review "... an outstanding piece of scholarship... Foster's book offers deeply intelligent, provocative, totally accessible analysis of a tradition and of writers still not sufficiently read and taught." --American Literature "Well written and thoroughly researched. Highly recommended... " --Choice The first comprehensive cultural history of literature by African American women prior to the 20th century. From the oral histories of Alice, a slave born in 1686, to the literary tradition that included Jarena Lee and Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert, this literature was argument, designed to correct or to instruct an audience often ignorant about or even hostile to black women.

The bestselling author of The Road from Coorain presents an extraordinarily powerful anthology of the autobiographical writings of 25 women, literary predecessors and contemporaries that include Jane Addams, Zora Neale Hurst, Harriet Jacobs, Ellen Glasgow, Maya Angelou, Sara Josephine Baker, Margaret Mead, Gloria Steinem, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

In this powerful new collection, the author of two of the most celebrated memoirs in recent years presents the autobiographical writings of 14 of her English-speaking predecessors and contemporaries. The women who tell their stories in Written By Herself, Vol. II represent three generations, four continents, and a range of experience that is equaled only by the diversity with which they transform life into literature. Here are England's Vera Brittain, commemorating the deaths of the men she loved in the carnage of World War I; Emma Mashinini, who endured imprisonment and torture as a labor organizer in South Africa; Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the daughter of Indian aristocracy who became an architect of her country's independence; and Edith Mirante, the wisecracking American whose passion for justice took her to the opium trails of Burma. Collected in this stirring volume, their voices demonstrate the ways in which women strive for power, inclusion, and autonomy-- and never fail to move, inspire, and instruct us. Contributors include: Margery Perham,Isak Dinesen,Shudha Mazumdar,Vivian Gornick, Vera Brittain, Elspeth Huxley, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Gloria Wade-Gayles, Angelica Garnett, Emma Mashinini, Meena Alexander, Edith Mirante, Mary Benson, and Ruth First.

This critical edition of Lennox's novel uses as its copy-text the first, and only known, edition of Harriot Stuart. The notes to the edition try to clarify the text for the modern reader by identifying people, places, and events, and commenting upon the ways in which aspects of the novel reflect or reject mid-eighteenth century social and literary prose.