The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English

by Lorna Sage (Editor)

This guide to women's writing in English aims to consolidate and epitomize the rereading of women's writing that has gone on in the past twenty-five years. There are entries on writers, on individual texts, and on general terms, genres and movements, all printed in a single alphabetical sequence. The earliest written documents in medieval English (the visionary writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe) are covered in an historical and geographical sweep that takes us up to the present. The entries reflect the spread of literacy, the history of colonization, and the development of postcolonial cultures using and changing the English language. The contributors are chosen from all the countries around the world--and represent academics, novelists, poets, critics, women and men. The result is a work of reference with a feel for the vitality, wealth and diversity of women's writing. Lorna Sage is Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia. She is also a literary journalist whose articles have appeared in such periodicals as the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review

Genres: Nonfiction, Books About Books, Reference

706 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 1999

About the author

The eldest child of Valma and Eric Stockton, she was named after Lorna Doone [1]. Sage was born at Hanmer, Flintshire, Wales, and educated at the village school, then at the Girls' High School in Whitchurch, Shropshire. Her childhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s is recalled in her last book Bad Blood. Sage became pregnant when she was 16 but was able to continue her education and won a scholarship to read English at Durham University, only after the university changed its admission rules to allow married couples to study there. Sage went on to receive an MA from Birmingham University for a thesis on seventeenth century poetry.

All of her academic career was spent at the University of East Anglia, where she was Professor of English Literature from 1994. She edited The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English (1999) which has become a standard work. In the Preface she wrote: "In concentrating on women's writing...you stress the extent and pace of change, for the scale of women's access to literary life has reflected and accelerated democratic, diasporic pressures in the modern world".