WOMEN'S WORLDS: The McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women's Writing in English Across the Globe

2083 Pages·2007·22.19 MB·English

by  Robyn Warhol-Down

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Women’s Worlds
The McGraw-Hill Anthology
of Women’s Writing
Edited by
Robyn Warhol-Down
University of Vermont
Diane Price Herndl
Iowa State University
Mary Lou Kete
University of Vermont
Lisa Schnell
University of Vermont
Rashmi Varma
University of Warwick
Beth Kowaleski Wallace
Boston College
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Published by McGraw-Hill, an imprint of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.,
1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. Copyright © 2008. All rights
reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or
by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
consent of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., including, but not limited to, in any
network or other electronic storage or transmission, or broadcast for distance
learning.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women’s worlds : the McGraw-Hill anthology of women’s writing / [edited by]
Robyn Warhol.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-07-256402-0 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-07-256402-4 (alk. paper)
1. English literature—Women authors. 2. American literature—Women authors.
3. Commonwealth literature (English)—Women authors. 4. Women—Literary
collections. I. Warhol, Robyn R.
PR1110.W6W67 2008
820.8'09287—dc22
2007043260
The Internet addresses listed in the text were accurate at the time of publication.
The inclusion of a Web site does not indicate an endorsement by the authors or
McGraw-Hill, and McGraw-Hill does not guarantee the accuracy of the
information presented at these sites.
www.mhhe.com
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About This Book
Women’s Worlds: The McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women’s Writingencompasses
literature by women from seven centuries of writing in English. The works in-
cluded are by women of different social backgrounds from all countries in the
English-speaking world. Edited by a dynamic group of scholars with expertise in
literature and women’s studies, the anthology offers works by over two hundred
women writers in traditional genres such as novels, stories, poems, essays, and
plays, as well as nontraditional ones such as diary entries, letters, hymns, trav-
elogues, blues lyrics, recipes, speeches, essays in literary and cultural criticism, and
even an excerpt from a graphic memoir. The text offers all this in one volume and
just over two thousand pages.
LITERATURE IN A CULTURAL STUDIES CONTEXT
To help students find their bearings in an often unfamiliar cultural landscape,
Women’s Worldsoffers informative century introductions and timelines; both help
students place the works in a broader social, material, cultural, and historical con-
text. Historical maps open each century section to depict the world as it looked
to authors writing in English during the period and showing how the English-
speaking world expanded over the centuries. Headnotes for each author provide
details about the writer’s life and work that can illuminate the selections. The se-
lections themselves are carefully footnoted, providing glosses of unfamiliar vocab-
ulary and cultural-historical references (while avoiding interpreting the readings).
An exciting innovation in anthology writing, Cultural Coordinates essays spot-
light details of everyday life that writers assumed readers would understand but
that have become unfamiliar over time and across locations. Illustrations—draw-
ings, needlework productions, historical photographs, advertisements, and works
of fine art—enrich the cultural context.
GLOBAL SCOPE
In addition to writers from England and the United States, the book includes clas-
sic and new voices from Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Scotland,
Ireland, and the Caribbean to reflect the worldwide spread of English through
colonization and emigration. In the later-nineteenth- and twentieth-century sec-
tions the anthology shifts the focus to writers from outside the United Kingdom
and the United States, as well as to British and American women writers of color,
moving away from the Anglo-American–focused model of traditional women’s
studies. The table of contents lists the writers’ nationalities, so readers can place
them; and an index that lists writers by region appears on the Web site (www
.mhhe.com/warhol1) for readers interested in examining a range of voices from
the same geographic area.
iii
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iv About This Book
COMPLETE WORKS
Included in their entirety are many longer works, such as Aphra Behn’s The Rover,
Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince,
Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Mar-
ket,” Kate Chopin’sThe Awakening, and Susan Glaspell’s Trifles.
THE LIBRARY OF WOMEN’S LITERATURE
To offer a manageable and affordable anthology while giving instructors a greater
choice in the complete works they wish to assign, McGraw-Hill offers instructors
who adopt the anthology the opportunity to package works from the Library of
Women’s Literature with the anthology at a discount. The Library of Women’s
Literature includes Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), Jane Eyre (Charlotte
Brontë), Little Women(Louisa May Alcott), The House of Mirth(Edith Whar-
ton), Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf), Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys), The Hand-
maid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood), A Raisin in the Sun (Lorraine Hansberry),
Beloved (Toni Morrison), The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros), Lucy
(Jamaica Kincaid), Cracking India (Bapsi Sidwa), Second Class Citizen (Buchi
Emecheta), The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri), and Playing in the Light (Zoe
Wicomb). Women’s Worldscontains a biographical headnote for each writer in
the Library of Women’s Literature, helping instructors place them in the context
of the anthology.
ONLINE RESOURCES
Additional resources for study and research, including a thorough bibliography
and a list of authors by region, are available on the Online Learning Center for
Women’s Worlds (www.mhhe.com/warhol1). Using McGraw-Hill’s Primis Online
(www.primisonline.com), instructors can supplement the anthology with selec-
tions from McGraw-Hill’s extensive literature database. The database includes
works such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s essay “You
Should Have Been a Boy,” and poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Also available are
chapters from many of McGraw-Hill’s most popular textbooks in women’s stud-
ies, such as Grewal-Kaplan’s An Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a
Transnational World, Second Edition; Lindemann’s An Invitation to Feminist
Ethics; and Woloch’s Women and the American Experience, Fourth Edition.
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Advance Praise for Women’s Worlds
[Women’s Worlds] offers its readers an exciting array of cross-cultural women
writers, as well as a strategy of organization, pedagogical apparatus, and culture-
studies approach that uniquely positions it among anthologies of women writers.
—Jamie Barlowe, University of Toledo
[The Cultural Coordinates essays] promise to bridge the gap between what
students see as the “stuff” we talk about in class and the ways they experience
gender, culture, and social practices everyday. . . .The editors’ inclusion both
of information regarding the production and reception of the texts in the
biographical headnotes and of the historical maps are . . . exciting innovations.
—Cara Cilano, University of North Carolina at Wilmington
. . . The option to order additional novels [from the Library of Women’s
Literature] is particularly attractive to me, as I could continue to use the text
and alter it each semester to keep material fresh and explore different themes.
—Kathleen Helal, Southwestern University
A versatile, culturally-oriented text that would be successful in a variety of
different courses on literature by women. Great choice!
—Amy Levin, Northern Illinois University
A user-friendly collection of women’s writing in English since the fourteenth
century. The inclusion of cultural context helps to provide a broader base of
knowledge about a wide range of women’s experiences over the centuries. Strong
inclusions by diverse women writers from a wide range of backgrounds and
identities—you ought to take a look at it!
—Jane Olmsted, Western Kentucky University
[The headnotes in Women’s Worlds] are scholarly but also readable, suitable for
undergraduates.
—Stephanie Vandrick, University of San Francisco
This anthology takes its cultural studies seriously. Its international scope and
innovative topics for [Cultural Coordinates essays] make it the only anthology
of its kind.
—Pamela Matthews, Texas A&M
[The Cultural Coordinates essays] are fascinating and valuable.
—Ann Norton, Saint Anselm College
[Women’s Worlds] is a text that represents women’s writings across time and
space, historically and geographically.
—Jeana DelRosso, College of Notre Dame of Maryland
This looks like a more global, inclusive text than has been available before.
—Gwen Argersinger, Mesa Community College at Red Mountain
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To all the women writers who are not represented in this volume
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Contents
List of Illustrations xxvii
General Introduction xli
The Fourteenth through Seventeenth Centuries 3
A Historical Overview, 1300–1700 4
Women’s Place in Society: The Dispossessed 6
Owning Their Words: Women’s Writing, 1300–1700 13
Timeline 17
JULIAN OF NORWICH(c. 1342–c. 1416;England) 23
FromRevelation of Divine Love 24
Chapter 3, The illness thus obtained from God 24
Chapter 5, God is all that is good 25
Chapter 59, Wickedness is transformed into blessedness 26
Chapter 60, We are brought back and fulfilled by our Mother Jesus 27
MARGERY KEMPE(c. 1373–c. 1438;England) 28
FromThe Book of Margery Kempe 29
Chapter 1 [Margery’s First Vision] 29
Chapter 11 [Margery Reaches a Settlement with Her Husband] 31
Chapter 46 [Margery’s Encounter with the Mayor of Leicester] 32
ANNE ASKEW(c. 1521–1546;England) 33
The Ballad Which Anne Askew Made and Sang When She Was
in Newgate 34
FromThe Latter Examination 36
The Sum of My Examination afore the King’s Council at Greenwich 36
Cultural Coordinates: Needlework 39
QUEEN ELIZABETH I(1533–1603;England) 41
The Dread of Future Foes 42
A Song Made by Her Majesty 42
ISABELLA WHITNEY(c. 1540s–c. 1578;England) 43
The Manner of Her Will, and What She Left to London and to All Those
in It, at Her Departing 44
ix