Drawing on a wide range of recent research, WOMEN IN ENGLAND is an intimate social history of women who experienced life between the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution. Anne Laurence writes about marriage, sex, childbirth, work within and outside the household, education, religion and women's activity in the community and the wider world. 'A marvellously rich and fresh survey of English women from the Reformation to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution' Roy Porter, The Sunday Times

Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men—one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history. Looser investigates the careers of Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Austen and shows how each of their contributions to historical discourse differed greatly as a result of political, historical, religious, class, and generic affiliations. Adding their contributions to accounts of early modern writing refutes the assumption that historiography was an exclusive men's club and that fiction was the only prose genre open to women.

This title was first published in 2002: Combining the approaches of historic scholarship and post-structural, feminist psychoanalytic theory to late 16th- and early 17th-century poetry by women, this book aims to make a unique contribution to the field of the study of early modern women's writings. One of the first to concentrate exclusively on early modern women's poetry, the full-length critical study to applies post-Lacanian French psychoanalytic theory to the genre. The strength of this study is that it merges analysis of socio-political constructions affecting early modern women poets writing in England with the psychoanalytic insights, specific to women as subjects, of post-Lacanian theorists Luce Irigaray, Helen Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Rosi Braidotti.