Elaine Showalter

"Authorship of the Battle Hymn of the Republic made [19th-century aspiring poet and playwright Julia Ward Lowe] celebrated and revered. But Julia was also continuing to fight a civil war at home; she became a pacifist, suffragist, and world traveler. She came into her own as a tireless campaigner for women's rights and social reform ... Elaine Showalter tells the story of Howe's determined self-creation and brings to life the society she inhabited...

Elaine Showalter is Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University. She has written and edited many books, including The Female Malady: Women, Madness and Society 1830-1980, Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing, Scribbling Women: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century Women, and Hystories. She is currently working on a study of feminist intellectuals. When first published...

""Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." It's one of the most famous opening lines in literature, that of Virginia Woolf's beloved masterpiece of time, memory, and the city. In the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell- shock and on the brink of madness....

Joyce Carol Oates's Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America's affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding...