Volume 8

The series Studies in Women Writers in English is a grateful acknowledgement of the contribution and public recognition of the emerging voice of women in the arena of English literature during the last few centuries, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century. Women writers across the globe have made their distinctive mark, with their own perception of life be it feminine, feminist or female.
The critique of work by women writers introduced in the present volume, the eighth in the series, bears evidence to the growing critical attention towards authors writing outside the mainstream, in America, and especially in India, as well as Indian émigré writers who can be seen sharing similar awareness and feelings regarding the woman's angst and aspirations. The twenty-one essays in this volume cover a wide range of women writers including five from Britain, i.e. the canonized and perennially fascinating Emily Brontë, the lonely Victorian talent Christina Rossetti, the pioneer feminist author Virginia Woolf, the poet Mina Loy, and Carol Ann Duffy, a poet of our times. In addition to these mainstream writers, three authors from America, i.e. Sylvia Plath, the celebrated poetic talent who chose to drop off before her time, and Jane Kenyon composing poetry in our times also figure alongside the towering Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, while Jean Rhys stands apart from the spatial categories as she writes with the Caribbean islands in her bones, even though settled in England. Besides, we have here a bunch of Indian writers, including both canonized precursors like Toru Dutt, Kamala Markandaya, and avant-gardes of our own times, writing either from outside or from within the heart of the countryranging from doyens like Kamala Das, Bapsi Sidhwa, Shashi Deshpande and Anita Desaito young innovators like Arundhati Roy or Tehmina Durrani of Pakistan, as well as established emigre writer like Bharati Mukherjee.

Since most of the authors discussed in these articles are prescribed in the English syllabi in the universities of India, both the teachers and the students will find them extremely useful. The general readers who are interested in literature in English and/or women writers will also find them intellectually stimulating.