The Norton anthology of literature by women: the tradition in English

Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

A book of showings ; [God the mother] / Julian of Norwich (1342-?)

The book of Margery Kempe ; [On female celibacy] / Margery Kempe (1373?-?)

The doubt of future foes ; On monsieur's departure ; Speech to the troops at Tilbury / Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)

To the thrice-sacred Queen Elizabeth / Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

Salve deus rex judaeorum ; [Eve's apology in defense of women] / Amelia Lanier (1570?-1640?)

Literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

The prologue ; In honour of that high and mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of happy memory ; The author to her book ; A letter to her husband, absent upon public employment ; To her father with some verses ; For deliverance from a fever ; Meditations divine and moral ; Here follows some verses upon the burning of our house July 10th, 1666, copied out of a loose paper / Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

Female orations / Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1674)

A fountain of gardens ; [The first vision] ; [The second vision] / Jane Lead (1624-1704)

To my excellent Lucasia, on our friendship / Katherine Philips (1631-1664)

A narrative of the captivity and restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson ; The third remove / Mary Rowlandson (c. 1636-c. 1678)

The willing mistress ; Love armed ; The disappointment ; On her loving two equally ; To the fair Clarinda, who made love to me, imagined more than woman / Aphra Behn (1640-1689)

To the ladies / Lady Mary Chudleigh (1656-1710)

Upon the saving that my verses were made by another / Anne Killigrew (1660-1685)

The introduction ; A letter to Daphnis, April 2, 1685 ; Friendship between Ephelia and Ardelia ; The circuit of Apollo ; The answer ; The spleen ; To the nightingale ; A nocturnal reverie / Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720)

A serious proposal to the ladies ; [A religious retirement] / Mary Astell (1666-1731)

Letter to the countess of bute, Lady Montagu's daughter [On her granddaughter] ; Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to her husband / Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)

Pressed by the moon, mute arbitress of tribes ; Thirty-eight / Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)

The diary and letters of Madame D'Arblay ; Letter from Miss F. Burney to Mrs. Phillips [Authoress of Evelina] / Fanny Burney (1752-1840)

On being brought from Africa to America ; To the right honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, his majesty's principal secretary of state for North America, etc. / Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784)

A vindication of the rights of woman ; Introduction ; Chapter II. The prevailing opinion of a sexual character discussed ; Chapter XIII. Some instances of the folly which the ignorance of women generates; with concluding reflections on the moral improvement that a revolution in female manners might naturally be expected to produce / Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1979)

Literature of the nineteenth century

Letters to literary ladies ; [An attack on literary ladies] ; [A defense of literary ladies] / Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849)

The grasmere journals ; Peaceful our valley, fair and green / Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855)

Love and friendship / Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Gifts of power ; A dream of slaughter ; The dream of the cakes ; The dream of washing quilts / Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795-1871)

The moral immortal: a tale / Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

Ain't I a woman? ; What time of night it is ; Keeping the thing going while things are stirring / Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883)

A true dream ; Grief ; To George Sand: A desire ; To George Sand: A recognition ; The cry of the children ; The runway slave at Pilgrim's point ; Hiram Powers' "Greek Slave" ; Sonnets from the Portuguese ; V ("I lift my heavy heart up solemnly") ; XXII ("When our two souls stand up erect and strong") ; XLIII ("How do I love thee? Let me count the ways") ; Aurora Leigh ; Book I [Aurora's parents] ; Book I [Aurora's journey to England and education there by her father's side] ; Book II [Romney's proposal of marriage to Aurora and her refusal] ; Book V [Aurora's theories of poetry] ; A curse for a nation ; Mother and poet / Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Woman in the nineteenth century ; [Prejudice against women] ; [Muse and minerva] ; [The future of women] / Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)

Cranford ; Chapter I. Our society ; Chapter II. The captain / Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865)

The minister's housekeeper / Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

Address to the New York State legislature, 1860 / Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Jane Eyre / Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)

[Tell me, tell me, smiling child] ; [I am the only being whose doom] ; [Alone I sat; the summer day] ; F. de Samara to A.G.A. ("Light up thy halls! 'Tis closing day") ; The night-wind ; [Riches I hold in light esteem] ; [Aye, there it is! It wakes to-night] ; A day dream ; R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida ("Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee!") ; [Ah! why, because the dazzling sun] ; The prisoner: a fragment ; [No coward would is mine] ; Stanzas ("Often rebuked, yet always back returning") / Emily Bronte (1818-1848)

Incidents in the life of a slave girl ; Chapter XXI. The loophole of retreat ; Chapter XXIX. Preparations for escape / Linda Brent (1818-1898)

The lifted veil ; Brother and sister / George Eliot (1819-1898)

Cassandra ; [Women's time] ; [The Savior of her race] / Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)

Lemorne versus Huell / Elizabeth Drew Stoddard (1823-1901)

Vashti ; Aunt Chloe's Politics ; Learning to read / Frances E.W. Harper

Our nig ; [Frado's childhood] / Harriet E.

Adams Wilson (1828?-1860?)

24 There is a morn by men unseen

- ; 211 Come slowly

-Eden! ; 249 Wild nights

-Wild nights! ; 258 There's a certain slant of light ; 271 A solemn thing

-it was

-I said

- ; 280 I felt a funeral, in my brain ; 288 I'm nobody! Who are you? ; 303 The soul selects her own society ; 312 Her

-"last poems"

- ; 341 After great pain, a formal feeling comes

- ; 365 Dare you see a soul at the white heat? ; 384 No rack can torture me

- ; 392 Through the dark sod

-as education ; 401 What soft

-Cherubic creatures

- ; 425 Good morning

-midnight

- ; 435 Much madness is divinest sense

- ; 441 This is my letter to the world ; 462 Why make it doubt

-it hurts it so

- ; 465 I heard a fly buzz

-when I died

- ; 508 I'm ceded

-I've stopped being Theirs

- ; 512 The soul has bandaged moments

- ; 528 Mine

-by the right of the white election! ; 569 I reckon

-when I count at all

- ; 579 I had been hungry, all the Years

- 593 I think I was enchanted ; 613 They shut me up in Prose

- ; 642 My from myself

-to banish

- ; 657 I dwell in possibility

- ; 669 No romance sold unto ; 670 One need not be a chamber

-to be haunted

- ; 709 Publication

-is the auction ; 712 Because I could not stop for death

- 722 Sweet mountains

-Ye tell me no lie

- ; 732 She rose to His requirement

-dropt ; 754 My life had stood

-A loaded gun

- ; 959 A loss of something ever felt I

- ; 986 A narrow fellow in the grass ; 1072 Title divine

-is mine! ; 1129 Tell all the truth but tell it slant

- ; 1138 A spider sewed at night ; 1445 Death is the supple suitor ; 1562 Her losses make our gains ashamed

- ; 1651 A words made flesh is seldom ; 1657 Eden is that old-fashioned house ; 1670 In winter in my room ; 1670 In winter in my room ; 1705 Volcanoes be in Sicily ; 1737 Rearrange a "Wife's" affection! ; Letters ; 233 [Daisy and her master] ; 248 [Daisy kneels a culprit] ; 260 ["Say if my verse is alive?"] ; 261 [My "companions"] ; 265 ["Frame"] ; 268 ["My business is circumference"] / Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Song ("When I am dead, my dearest") ; Symbols ; After death ; A soul ; The world ; Dead before death ; Cobwebs ; Shut out ; A triad ; A birthday ; Up-hill ; The covenant threshold ; Goblin market ; In an artist's studio ; Eve ; Enrica, 1865 ; Venus's looking-glass / Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Life in the iron-mills / Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) ; Work ; [In service] / Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)

Turn-of-the-century literature

The sunderland children ; Parentage ; A father of women: Ad Sororem E.B. / Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

The diary ; May 31st, 1889 [My first journal!] ; July 12th, 1889 [My microscopic field] ; February 17th, 1890 [Pharasaism; death] ; October 26th, 1890 [My "hidden self"] ; May 31st, 1891 [Going downhill] ; February 2nd, 1892 [This long slow dying] ; March 4th, 1892 [This long slow dying] ; Final entry by Katharine P. Loring

The town poor / Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)

The awakening / Kate Chopin (1851-1904)

Old woman magoun / Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930)

Spreading the news / Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1930)

Dream life and real life; A little African story ; Woman and labour ; [Sex-parasitism] / Olive Schreiner (1855-1920)

The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gillan (1860-1935)

The other side of a mirror ; Regina ; The devil's funeral ; The witch ; Doubt ; The white women ; Marriage / Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861-1907)

The angel at the grave ; The other two / Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

The bambino / May Sinclair (1863-1946)

The farmer's bride ; The quiet house / Charlotte Mew (1870-1928)

Two hanged women / Henry Handel Richardson (1870-1946)

Modernist literature

Jordan's end / Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945).

Coming, Aphrodite! / Willa Cather (1873-1957)

Death / Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957)

The letter ; Venus transiens ; Madonna of the evening flowers ; The weather-cock points south ; Opal ; A decade ; The sisters / Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

The gentle Lena ; Picasso ; Ada / Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

I sit and sew / Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)

Sonnets from a Lock box ; XIV ("What witchlike spell weaves here its deep design") ; XXV ("Into the void behold my shuddering flight") ; XXXI ("I say that words are men and when we spell") / Anna Hempstead Branch (1875-1837)

Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights ; 22 hyde park gate ; A woman's college from outside ; The new dress ; Moments of being: "Slater's pins have no points" ; A room of one's own ; [Shakespeare's sister] ; Professions for women / Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Trifles / Susan Glaspell (1882-1948)

The cooboo / Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883-1967)

Meditation at kew ; The affinity ; Divorce ; Dedication of the cook / Anna Wickham

The eagle and the mole ; Atavism ; Wild peaches ; Full moon ; Let no charitable hope ; One person ; XII ("In our content, before the autumn came") ; To a Lady's countenance ; Portrait in Black Paint, with a very sparing use of Whitewash ; Pastiche / Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)

The blank page / Isak Dinesen (1885-1962)

The fat of the land / Anzia Yezierska (c. 1885-1970)

Miss Ogilvy finds herself / Radclyffe Hall (1886-1943)

Oread ; Sea poppies ; Eurydice ; Fragment thirty-six ; Helen ; Tribute to the Angels ; 1-3 ; 8-14 ; 24-29 ; 35-43 / H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)

En famille ; Sir Beelzebub ; Aubade ; Lullaby ; Serenade: Any man to any woman ; A bird's song ; Song ("Where is all the bright company gone

-") / Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)

To a snail ; Poetry ; Sojourn in the whale ; Sea unicorns and land unicorns ; An Egyptian pulled glass bottle in the shape of a fish ; Silence ; No swan so fine ; The jerboa ; Marriage ; The paper nautilus ; His shield ; O to be a dragon / Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

The daughters of the late colonel ; The doll's house / Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)

The origin of diseases ; Coyote takes his daughter as a wife ; Coyote kills owl-woman / Mourning Dove (Hum-Ishu-Ma) (1888-1936)

The jilting of Granny Weatherall / Katherine Anne Porter (c. 1890-1980)

First fig ; Second fig ; [Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!] ; [I, being born a woman and distressed] ; Sonnets from an ungrafted tree ; The buck in the snow ; To Inez Milholland ; [Women have loved before as I love now] ; [Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave] ; Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies ; Apostrophe to man ; Rendezvous ; The fitting ; [I too beneath your moon, almighty sex] ; [The courage that my mother had] ; An Ancient gesture / Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

Cassation / Djuna Barnes (1892-1982)

Indissoluble matrimony / Rebecca West (1892-1983)

Resume ; One perfect rose ; News item ; Song of one of the girls ; A pig's-eye view of literature ; The lives and times of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron ; Oscar Wilde ; Harriet Beecher Stowe ; D.G. Rossetti ; Thomas Carlyle ; Alfred, Lord Tennyson ; Walter Savage Landor ; George Sand ; You were perfectly fine / Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

On not shooting sitting birds / Jean Rhys (1894-1979)

Medusa ; The crows ; Women ; Cassandra ; The crossed apple ; The sleeping fury ; Evening in the sanitarium ; Several voices out of a cloud ; The dream / Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

The military harpist ; The Irish patriarch ; Old Nelly's birthday ; Yorkshire wife's sage / Ruth Pitter (1897- )

The demon lover / Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)

Annunciation / Meridel le Sueur (1900

)

Sweat ; How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston (1901?-1960)

Contemporary literature

Paper love baby ; This Englishwoman ; Lord Barrenstock ; Dear female heart ; Souvenir de Monsieur poop ; Human affection ; The wanderer ; Lightly bound ; Not waving but drowning ; How cruel is the story of Eve / Stevie Smith (1902-1971)

The diary of Anais Nin ; [December 30, 1931] [June Miller

The woman I want to be] ; [August, 1937] [Gender and creativity] / Anais Nin (1903-1977)

Winter night / Kay Boyle (1903- ) ; Pentimento ; [Pentimento defined] ; Pentimento / Lillian Hellman (1907-1984)

Iris wanderer ; Kore in hades ; Heirloom ; [What substance had Euridice] ; [On its way I see] / Kathleen Raine (1908

)

Green rain ; Eve ; The three Emily's ; The children's letters / Dorothy Livesay (1909- )

The wide net / Eudora Welty (1909- ) ; [Gender and art] ; The man-moth ; Roosters ; The fish ; At the fishhouses ; Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore ; In the waiting room ; The moose ; One art ; Pink dog / Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

Reason ; [In the town where every man is king] ; [Dear Frank, here is a poem] ; Doll ; Parent ; Bureau ; Concert ; Why we are late / Josephine Miles (1911

)

Memories of a Catholic girlhood ; Names / Mary McCarthy (1912

)

My sisters, o my sisters ; Letter from Chicago ; The muse as Medusa / May Sarton (1912- )

Boy with his hair cut short ; More of a corpse than a woman ; Who in one lifetime ; Letter to the front ; VII ("To be a Jew in the twentieth century") ; The birth of Venus ; The poem as mask ; The power of suicide ; Kathe Kollwitz ; Myth ; Along history / Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

Tell me a riddle / Tillie Olsen (1913

)

In an iridescent time ; Periphery ; The song of Absinthe Granny ; Secondhand coat / Ruth Stone (1915

)

Dark blood ; Lineage ; Molly means ; Kissie Lee ; Whores / Margaret Walker (1915

)

Half-caste girl ; The sisters ; Ishtar ; Request to a year ; To another housewife ; Eve to her daughters ; Naked girl and mirror ; "Rosina Alcona to Julius Brenzaida" / Judith Wright (1915- )

The stenographers ; Typists / P.K. Page (1916

)

Wunderkind / Carson McCullers (1917-1967)

The mother ; The womanhood ; 3 ("Stand off, daughter of the dusk") ; The bean eaters ; We real cool ; Jessie Mitchell's Mother ; The crazy woman ; Bronzeville woman in a red hat ; Queen of the blues ; Riot / Gwendolyn Brooks (1917

)

The fathers' daughters / Muriel Spark (1918

)

The lottery / Shirley Jackson (1919-1965)

To room nineteen / Doris Lessing (1919

)

Women ; Bleeding / May Swenson (1919

)

Welcome Eumenides / Eleanor Ross Taylor (1920

)

Enormous changes at the last minute / Grace Paley (1922

)

Town and country lovers / Nadine Gordimer (1923

)

The goddess ; Song for Ishtar ; Hypocrite women ; In mind ; The ache of marriage ; The crack ; Eros at Temple stream ; About marriage ; The wings ; Abel's bride ; The son ; Stepping westward ; The mutes ; A note to Olga (1966) ; Cancion ; Divorcing / Denise Levertov (1923

)

Good country people / Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

Pro femina ; Three ("I will speak about women of letters, for I'm in the racket") ; Semele recycled / Carolyn Kizer (1925

)

Making the jam without you ; The envelope ; How it is / Maxine W. Kumin

The loons / Margaret Laurence (1926

)

Her kind ; The moss of his skin ; Housewife ; Somewhere in Africa ; Consorting with angels ; Sylvia's death ; In celebration of my uterus ; O ye tongues ; Third Psalm / Anne Sexton (1928-1974).

I know why the caged bird sings ; [The peckerwood dentist and momma's incredible powers] / Mary Angelou (1928

)

Sur / Ursula K. Le Guin (1929

)

Aunt Jennifer's tigers ; Snapshots of a daughter-in-law ; "I am in danger

sir

" ; Planetarium ; I dream I'm the death or Orpheus ; Diving into the wreck ; From a survivor ; Power ; Twenty-one love poems ; XI ("Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes") ; (The floating poem, unnumbered) ; XXI ("The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones") ; Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev ; Culture and anarchy ; When we dead awaken: Writing as re-vision / Adrienne Rich (1929

)

In defense of the equality of men / Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)

The bluest eye / Toni Morrison (1931- )

Wild swans / Alice Munro (1931- )

The disquieting muses ; The colossus ; Parliament hill fields ; The bee meeting ; The arrival of the bee box ; Stings ; The swarm ; Wintering ; Daddy ; Medusa ; Ariel ; Nick and the candlestick ; Lady Lazarus ; Words ; Edge / Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

A rose in the heart / Edna O'Brien (1932

)

The marriage ; Respectable house ; Re-reading Jane / Anne Stevenson (1933- )

Against coupling ; The ex-queen among the Astronomers / Fleur Adcock (1934

)

An introduction / Kamala Das (1934- )

Coal ; On a night of the full moon ; Now that I am forever with child ; From the house of Yemanja ; Coniagui women ; The women of dan dance with swords in their hands to mark the time when they were warriors / Audre Lorde (1934

)

Admonitions ; the astrologer predicts at mary's birth ; anna speaks of the childhood of mary her daughter ; mary's dream ; how he is coming then ; holy night ; a song of mary ; island mary / Lucille Clifton (1936

)

The friend ; The token woman ; You don't understand me / Marge Piercy (1936

)

When it changed / Joanna Russ (1937

)

Belly dancer ; Blue Monday ; Ringless ; My trouble ; The mirror of a day chiming marigold / Diane Wakoski (1937

)

Where are you going, where have you been? / Joyce Carol Oates (1938

)

This is a photograph of me ; The animals in that country ; The landlady ; Procedures for underground ; [You fit into me] ; Circe/Mud poems ; [People come from all over to consult me, bringing their limbs] ; [I made no choice] ; [This story was told to me by another traveller, just passing] ; [It's the story that counts. No use telling me this isn't a story] ; Spelling ; Rape fantasies / Margaret Atwood (1939

)

My man Bovanne / Toni Cade Bambara (1939

)

A voyage to Cythera / Margaret Drabble (1939

)

The company of wolves / Angela Carter (1940

)

[in the place where] ; The common women ; II. Ella, in a square apron, along Highway 80 ; III. Nadine, resting on her neighbor's stoop

No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston (1940

)

The message / Ama Ata Aidoo (1942

)

Castration of the pen ; Alcestis on the poetry circuit / Erica Jong (1942

)

Illuminations ; Dedication to hunger ; Horse / Louise Gluck (1943

)

I like to think of Harriet Tubman / Susan Griffin (1943

)

Everyday use ; In search of our mothers' gardens / Alice Walker (1944

)

Lullaby / Leslie Marmon Silko (1948

)

Selected bibliography

Index.