Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing A Guide to Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own

by Jansen, Sharon L.

• ISBN13: 9780230110663
• ISBN10: 0230110665
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

In this work, Jansen explores a recurring theme in writing by women: the dream of finding or creating a private and secluded retreat from the world of men. These imagined #x1C;women#x19;s worlds#x1D; may be very small, a single room, for example, but many women writers are much more ambitious, fantasizing about cities, even entire countries, created for and inhabited exclusively by women.

Author Biography

Sharon L. Jansen is the author of Debating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe; Anne of France: Lessons for My Daughter; The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe; and Dangerous Talk and Strange Behavior: Women and Popular Resistance to the Reforms to Henry VIII.

Table of Contents

Reading Nafisi at the YMCA * I Have a Dream:  Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own * Let’s Talk:  Conversation in Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women and Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries * Design for Living:  Women’s Communities in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies * Trouble in Paradise:  Men in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Doris Lessing’s The Cleft * Buried Alive:  Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” * Brave New Worlds:  Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale and Slavenka Drakulic’s S.  A Novel about the Balkans * Still Crazy after All These Years:  Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran