The madwoman in the attic : the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination

In this work the authors explore the works of many 19th-century women writers. They chart a tangible desire expressed for freedom from the restraints of a confining patriarchal society and trace a distinctive female literary tradition. The Queen's looking glass: female creativity, male images of women, and the metaphor of literary paternity -- Infection in the sentence: the women writer and the anxiety of authorship -- The parables of the cave -- Shut up in prose: gender and genre in Austen's Juvenilia -- Jane Austen's cover story (and its secret agents) -- Milton's bogey: patriarchal poetry and women readers -- Horror's twin: Mary Shelley's monstrous Eve -- Looking oppositely: Emily Brontë's bible of hell -- A secret, inward wound: The professor's pupil -- A dialogue of self and soul: plain Jane's progress -- The genesis of hunger, according to Shirley -- The buried life of Lucy Snowe -- Made keen by loss: George Eliot's veiled vision -- George Eliot as the angel of destruction -- The aesthetics of renunciation -- A woman, white: Emily Dickinson's yarn of pearl.