Sensitive, searingly intelligent, and beautifully written. --Claire Dederer, author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

This is--for real--a masterwork, one I will return to over and over. --Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year

In this intimate and riveting memoir, Best American Essayist Nicole Graev Lipson breaks through the ready-made stories of womanhood, rescuing truth from the fiction that infiltrates our lives.

What does it take to escape the plotlines mapped onto us? Searching for clues in the work of her literary foremothers, Lipson untangles what it means to be a girl, a woman, a lover, a partner, a daughter, and a mother in a world all too ready to reduce us to stock characters. Whether she's testing the fragile borders of fidelity, embracing the taboo power of female friendship, escaping her family for the solitude of the mountains, grappling with what to do with her frozen embryos, or letting go of the children she imagined for the ones she's raising, Lipson pushes beyond the easy, surface stories we tell about ourselves to brave less certain territory.

As Lipson journeys through this thorny terrain, literature becomes her lodestar. Kate Chopin's erotic story The Storm helps her reckon with the longings stirring below the surface of her marriage. Watching her son absorb the stifling codes of manhood, she finds unlikely parenting inspiration in Philip Roth's most cartoonish overbearing mother. Summoning Gwendolyn Brooks, she asks, Can destroying one's frozen embryos be understood as a maternal act? And accompanied by Shakespeare's gender-bending heroine Rosalind, she seizes on the truest meaning of loving her oldest child.

Risky and revealing, nourishing and affirming, rigorous and sexy, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is a shimmering love letter to our forgotten selves--and the ones we're still becoming.

Jane Austen, a renowned English novelist of the nineteenth century, crafted timeless tales that continue to captivate readers to this day. Her greatest works are a testament to her wit, social commentary, and keen understanding of human nature. In this set of five books, immerse yourself in Austen's world of societal manners and romantic entanglements. Pride and Prejudice showcases the complexities of love and social hierarchy, while Emma explores the pitfalls of matchmaking. Sense and Sensibility delves into the contrast between rationality and emotions, while Mansfield Park delves into themes of morality and duty. Finally, Persuasion offers a poignant exploration of second chances and the power of persuasion. These masterpieces transport readers to a bygone era and leave an indelible mark on literature.

• Lively romance blossoms in Pride and Prejudice.
• Emma's meddling creates amusing romantic entanglements.
• Love and societal expectations collide in Sense and Sensibility.
• Mansfield Park reveals the complexities of morality and duty.
• Persuasion examines the transformative power of second chances.

A manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a generation of writers and scholars, reissued after more than a decade.

I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order--pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.

On the last day of December 2009, Kate Zambreno, then an unpublished writer, began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with literary modernism and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her partner held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy portraits of the fates of the modernist wives and mistresses, reclaiming the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community of writers and devised a new feminist discourse of writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.

In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it--she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the minor, and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological, writes Zambreno. When he does, it's existential. With Heroines, Zambreno provided a model for a newly subjectivized criticism, prefiguring many group biographies and forms of autotheory and hybrid memoirs that were to come in the years to follow. A book that has become its own canon, Heroines was named one of the 50 Books that define the past 5 Years in Literature by Flavorwire, an Essential Feminist Manifesto by Dazed, and one of the 50 Greatest Books by Women in Buzzfeed.

Singing by Herself reinterprets the rise of literary loneliness by foregrounding the female and feminized figures who have been overlooked in previous histories of solitude. Many of the earliest records of the terms lonely and loneliness in British literature describe solitaries whose songs positioned them within the tradition of female complaint.

Amelia Worsley shows how these feminized solitaries, for whom loneliness was both a space of danger and a space of productive retreat, helped to make loneliness attractive to future lonely poets, despite the sense of suspicion it evoked. Although loneliness today is often associated with states of atomized interiority, soliloquy, and self-enclosure, this study of eighteenth-century poetry disrupts the presumed association between isolation, singular speech, and bounded models of poetic subjectivity.

In five chapters focused on lonely poet figures in the works of John Milton, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Charlotte Smith--which also take account of the wider eighteenth-century fascination with literary loneliness--Singing by Herself shows how poets increasingly associated the new literary mode of being alone with states of disembodiment, dispersal, and echoic self-doubling. Seemingly solitary lonely voices often dissolve into polyvocal, allusive community, Worsley argues, when in dialogue with each other and also with classical figures of feminized lament such as Sappho, Echo, and Philomela.

The book's provocative reflections on lyric mean that it will have a broad appeal to scholars interested in the history of poetry and poetics, as well as to those who study the literary history of gender, affect, and emotion.

The mid-twentieth-century woman was stereotypically seen as a housewife and mother, who shopped. But whether as purchaser, parent or professional, women's defining identities have been transformed, with a loosening of seemingly stone-set gender divisions and a feminist emphasis on expanding choices and different stories. Looking especially at consumer culture and parenthood, this book delves into some of the mutations involved. Here are marketing manuals and newspaper stories, as well as novels and tragedies, from Austen to Aeschylus. Unexpected Items is in part a plea for the uses and pleasures of critical reading--of all kinds of text--as a historical method, showing how meanings move on in the light of new contexts and questions, and also how looking close up at the way the words work can itself be a source of new thinking. The woman, the mother, the consumer, the parent--all human characters clash and change, and so do their likely stories.

Explores the biopolitics of modern metabolism, of how humans manage the world through their peristaltic systems, as they ingest food and produce waste. Set against a backdrop of Marx's theory of how we mediate, regulate, and control our metabolic relation to nature, of the rise of a bourgeois faecal habitus, of the relegation of domestic waste management to female meta-industrial workers, of depleted agricultural fields and polluted urban centres, Dissident Gut performs three in-depth case studies of early twentieth-century English and European women whose wayward intestinal systems intervene in larger social, affective, and political networks, and who assert a peristaltic grammar of desire and resistance. Intervenes in theoretical discussions around the gut-brain axis, biopolitics and biopower, materialist feminism, psychoanalysis and hysteria, bodily habitus, and waste management.

Pinpointing how consumer culture transformed female beauty ideals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study documents the movement from traditional views about beauty in relation to nature, God, morality and character to a modern conception of beauty as produced in and through consumer culture. While beauty has often been approached in relation to aestheticism and the visual arts in this period, this monograph offers a new and significant focus on how beauty was reshaped in girls' and women's magazines, beauty manuals and fiction during the rise of consumer culture. These archival sources reveal important historical changes in how femininity was shaped and illuminate how contemporary ideas of female beauty, and the methods by which they are disseminated, originated in seismic shifts in nineteenth-century print culture.

Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition

Series Editors: Thomas Rickert and Jennifer Bay

The scholars in FEMINIST CIRCULATIONS: RHETORICAL EXPLORATIONS ACROSS SPACE AND TIME work at the nexus of gender, power, and movement to explore the rhetorical nature of circulation, especially considering how women from varying backgrounds and their rhetorics have moved and have been constrained across both space and time. Among the central characters studied in this collection are early modern laborers, letter writers, petitioners, and embroiderers; African American elocutionists, freedom singers, and bloggers; Muslim religious leaders; Quaker suffragists; South African filmmakers; nineteenth-century conduct book writers; and twenty-first-century pop stars. To generate their claims, contributors draw from and make use of a breadth of archival and primary documents: music videos, tweets, petitions, letters, embroidery work, speeches, memoirs, diaries, and made-for-television movies. Authors read these texts with scrutiny and imagination, adding distinction to their chapters' arguments about circulation by zeroing in on specific rhetorical concepts that span from rhetorical agency, cultivation of ethos, and development of rhetorical education to capacities for social networking, collective and collaborative authorship, and kairotic interventions.

Contributors include Jane Donawerth, Jessica Enoch, Danielle Griffin, Nabila Hijazi, Shirley Logan, Elizabeth Ellis Miller, Karen Nelson, Michele Osherow, Ruth Osorio, Erin Sadlack, Adele Seeff, and Lisa Zimmerelli.

When passion flares between them...two indiscretions a Countess does make. A Reckless Rockwood, Constance plays matchmaker, but at what cost to her marriage?

Experience taught Gideon Lethbridge, Earl of Chelmsford, women will sell themselves for money and social position. When a passionate interlude in a dark garden sets Gideon's heart on fire, he's furious to learn his lover is an American heiress who bought herself a title. Despite his anger at being hoodwinked by Viscountess Helstone, she's haunted Gideon's dreams for the past five years. Now he's planning her seduction, and he intends to make Phoebe surrender to one wicked, sinful moment of pleasure after another.

Five years ago, despair and a need for solace sent Phoebe, Viscountess Helstone, into the arms of a stranger for one fiery moment of indiscretion. Now penniless, Phoebe is the anonymous author of the Currer Chronicles mocking the Marlborough Set. When Phoebe comes face-to-face with the man she's never forgotten, she's horrified to learn she's ridiculed him mercilessly in her satirical serial. With Gideon determined to seduce her, Phoebe is desperate to keep her writing a secret while trying not to admit she's been in love with Gideon for the past five years.

Like most Reckless Rockwoods, the an dara sealladh is a part of who Constance Blakemore, Countess of Lyndham, is. Although her husband, Lucien, insists Constance must stop using her psychic abilities to meddle in the affairs of others. Despite knowing Lucien's feelings in the matter, she cannot abandon a friend in need. But helping a friend puts Constance's marriage and happiness in jeopardy as well. By ignoring Lucien's request, Constance might lose the one thing that will destroy her, Lucien's love.

This book opens with an unintentional indiscretion some readers may find to be an objectionable trope. The incident is this one scene only and is available to read in the Look Inside sample. The Reckless Rockwoods Novels prominently feature different members of the Rockwood family as they meddle in their friends' lives to ensure they find a happy ending. Constance Rockwood Blakemore, Countess of Lyndham, and her husband Lucien are featured in The Rogue's Countess.

OTHER BOOKS IN THE RECKLESS ROCKWOODS SERIES and NOVELS

Book 1 - Obsession (Sebastian and Helen)

Book 2- Dangerous (Constance and Lucien)

Book 3 - The Highlander's Woman (Patience and Julian) - Scottish setting

Book 4 - Redemption (Rhea and Percy)

Book 5- The Beastly Earl (Louisa and Ewan) - Scottish setting

A Reckless Rockwoods Novel: Book 1 - The Rogue's Offer: Reluctant Rogues (Ophelia and Mathias; featuring Louisa Rockwood Colquhoun, Countess of Argaty )

A Reckless Rockwoods Novel: Book 2 - The Rogue's Countess: Reluctant Rogues (Gideon and Phoebe; featuring Constance Rockwood Blakemore, Countess of Lyndham)

Single Lives is a collection of singleness studies essays from the interdisciplinary humanities that explores the last two hundred years of literature and popular media by, about, and for single women in the US and the UK. Independent women have always been a center around which social anxieties and excitement coalesced. Moving between the family home and domestic independence, between household and public labor, and between celibacy and a range of sexual relations, the single woman remains a literary and cultural focus, as she has been from the 19th to the 21st centuries. This collection offers readers the opportunity to uncover the social, political, economic, and cultural connections between the singly blessed women and bachelor girls of the 19th and early 20th century and all the single ladies of the 21st century. Essays read singleness across genre and field, offering new approaches to studying modern and contemporary single women in literature, film, and history. Authors engage scholarship from wide ranging fields of social history, women's studies, queer theory, and Black feminism. The collection reads familiar texts against the grain, rethinking archival resources, revisiting familiar figures, and exploring new sources: cookbooks, ephemera, personal documents, recovered film histories, and forms of domestic space and labor.This is a book for scholars of gender and sexuality, social history, feminist film and media scholars, and literary historians, and reflects the urgent contemporary interest in single women as a political, economic, and cultural force.

Single Lives is a collection of singleness studies essays from the interdisciplinary humanities that explores the last two hundred years of literature and popular media by, about, and for single women in the US and the UK. Independent women have always been a center around which social anxieties and excitement coalesced. Moving between the family home and domestic independence, between household and public labor, and between celibacy and a range of sexual relations, the single woman remains a literary and cultural focus, as she has been from the 19th to the 21st centuries. This collection offers readers the opportunity to uncover the social, political, economic, and cultural connections between the singly blessed women and bachelor girls of the 19th and early 20th century and all the single ladies of the 21st century. Essays read singleness across genre and field, offering new approaches to studying modern and contemporary single women in literature, film, and history. Authors engage scholarship from wide ranging fields of social history, women's studies, queer theory, and Black feminism. The collection reads familiar texts against the grain, rethinking archival resources, revisiting familiar figures, and exploring new sources: cookbooks, ephemera, personal documents, recovered film histories, and forms of domestic space and labor.This is a book for scholars of gender and sexuality, social history, feminist film and media scholars, and literary historians, and reflects the urgent contemporary interest in single women as a political, economic, and cultural force.

Pinpointing how consumer culture transformed female beauty ideals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study documents the movement from traditional views about beauty in relation to nature, God, morality and character to a modern conception of beauty as produced in and through consumer culture. While beauty has often been approached in relation to aestheticism and the visual arts in this period, this monograph offers a new and significant focus on how beauty was reshaped in girls' and women's magazines, beauty manuals and fiction during the rise of consumer culture. These archival sources reveal important historical changes in how femininity was shaped and illuminate how contemporary ideas of female beauty, and the methods by which they are disseminated, originated in seismic shifts in nineteenth-century print culture.

Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism is the first book-length work to explore the interrelationships between contemporary female musicians and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, music, and literature by women and men. The music and videos of contemporary musicians including Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, The Carters, Hélène Cixous, Missy Elliot, the Indigo Girls, Janet Jackson, Janis Joplin (and Big Brother and the Holding Company), Natalie Merchant, Joni Mitchell, Janelle Monáe, Alanis Morrisette, Siouxsie Sioux, Patti Smith, St. Vincent (Annie Clark), and Alice Walker are explored through the lenses of pastoral and Afropresentism, Gothic, female Gothic, and the literature of William Blake, Beethoven, Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Dacre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ann Radcliffe, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Walpole, Jane Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth to explore how each sheds light on the other, and how women have appropriated, responded to, and been inspired by the work of authors from previous centuries.

You Can Never Satisfy A Woman is about many things in a woman's life that happens. The story is about a woman the way she thinks, speaks and do things. These experiences, thoughts and research I have learned growing up to adulthood about woman or women. A woman mind can change anytime, so you have to be ready.

You Can Never Satisfy A Woman is about many things in a woman's life that happens. The story is about a woman the way she thinks, speaks and do things. These experiences, thoughts and research I have learned growing up to adulthood about woman or women. A woman mind can change anytime, so you have to be ready.

Explores the link between revolutionary change in the Victorian world of print and women's entry into the field of mass-market publishing
This book highlights the integral relationship between the rise of the popular woman writer and the expansion and diversification of newspaper, book and periodical print media during a period of revolutionary change, 1832-1860. It includes discussion of canonical women writers such as Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, as well as lesser-known figures such as Eliza Cook and Frances Brown. It also examines the ways women readers actively responded to a robust popular print culture by creating scrapbooks and engaging in forms of celebrity worship. Easley analyses the ways Victorian women's participation in popular print culture anticipates our own engagement with new media in the twenty-first century.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, women's employment representation reached a peak in the economy. This hasn't grown since then. We lack women in all layers of the workforce in equal numbers as men. Fortune 500 businesses have 40 women CEOs, but that represents only 8 percent of all CEOs. If things continue as they are, it will take 108 years to achieve the needed level of diversity. Data and research have shown that companies benefit from diversity and inclusion in the marketplace. Being inclusive and encouraging a diverse workplace are becoming more important.

Business leaders that value diversity is now more prevalent than ever before, with a 32% increase since 2014. Most companies want a diversified staff by 2030 when that percentage is predicted to reach over 40%. Women with talent in the workforce have a wide variety of opportunities and a bright future. To assist women to overcome obstacles and create objectives, the book covers essential business process concepts. Throughout the book, you'll learn how to use numerous approaches to detect various variables in branding, personal growth, and forming alliances, as well as how to use leveraging and public speaking effectively. This book is designed with information you'll need to succeed as an impactful influence.

The Partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 unleashed unprecedented violence. In Feminist Fiction and the Indian Partition of 1947, Indian scholar Priyanka Gupta explores how women were doubly suppressed and victimized before and after the partition. The violence, and the displacement of large populations, made this historical episode of separation more and more significant for women. Novels set during the Partition offer unique viewpoints and perspectives that have not previously been explored.

The longest-running war is the battle over how women should behave. Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman examines six centuries of advice literature, analyzing the print origins of gendered expectations that continue to inform our thinking about women's roles and abilities. Close readings of numerous conduct manuals from Britain and America, written by men and women, explain and contextualize the legacy of sexism as represented in prescriptive writing for women from 1372 to the present.

This book presents a unique trans-historical approach, arguing that conduct manuals were influenced by their predecessors and in turn shaped their descendants. While existing period-specific studies of conduct manuals consider advice literature within the society that wrote and read them, this book provides the only analysis of both the volumes themselves and the larger debates taking place within their pages across the centuries. Building on critical conversations about literature's efforts to define and construct gender roles, this book examines conduct manuals' contributions to the female ideal prevalent when they were published, as well as the persistence or alteration of that ideal in subsequent eras.

Combining textual literary analysis with a social history sensibility while remaining accessible to expert and novice, this book will help readers understand the on-going debate about the often-contradictory guidelines for female behavior.