Pickering women's classics

Writing from very different perspectives and backgrounds, Christina Rossetti and Dinah Mulock Craik were profoundly concerned with the problems of single women and female vocation. Maude, written when Rossetti was nineteen years old, reveals, with great clarity, her desires and anxieties about literary achievement within the confines of Victorian values and family restrictions. Although never seriously drawn to convent life, Rossetti became for a time an associate of one of the flourishing and controversial Anglican Sisterhoods. Craik's essay On Sisterhoods, in which she encourages unmarried women to join these organisations, shows that in offering work, responsibility and security outside the family, the sisterhoods presented a challenge to contemporary ideas about the place and duty of women. The immensely popular, progressive and optimistic A Women's Thoughts about Women emerges as an essentially rational work, urging women to act individually, collectively and above all positively, in forging their own destinies.

Florence Nightingale (1820-1920) is famous as the heroine of the Crimean War and later as a campaigner for health care founded on a clean environment and good nursing. Though best known for her pioneering demonstration that disease rather than wounds killed most soldiers, she was also heavily allied to social reform movements and to feminist protest against the enforced idleness of middle-class women. This original edition provides bold new insights into Nightingale's beliefs and a new picture of the relationship between feminism and religion. Nightingale argues that work was the means by which every individual sought self-fulfillment and served God. She wrote influentially about the group most Victorians declared to be above work unmarried, middle-class women. Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth Among the Artisans of England (1860), which contains the novel Cassandra, is a central text in nineteenth-century history of feminist thought and is published here for the first time.

"This Broadview edition pairs two of Frances Burney's linked comedies. They both present the character of Lady Smatter, a "femme savante" whose lineage may be traced back to Moliere; they both centre on the misfortunes of the "elle" figure, the dispossessed heiress and wife who appears frequently in Burney's fiction; and they both criticize a culture of misogyny that breeds suspicion and resentment. The Witlings, lighter and more comic, derives from late seventeenth-century conventions; The Woman-Hater, more melodramatic, both expresses and warns against the excessive sensibility of romanticism. Together, these two plays constitute a miniature history of English drama from the Restoration to the French Revolution and beyond.". "This edition contains a valuable selection of appendices, including: Burney's "Epilogue to Gerilda"; letters and diary entries; contemporary writings on comedy; and Burney's cast-list for The Woman-Hater."--BOOK JACKET.