During the last few centuries women writers have considerably widened and deepened the areas of human experience—with their sharp, feminine perception of life successfully transmuted into verbal artifact. The world body of literature in English would have been much poorer today but for the contribution of women writers. The new series—Studies in Women Writers in English—is a grateful acknowledgment of that contribution and public recognition of their voice. The twenty-three essays included in this fourth volume of the series cover a wide spectrum of women writers across space and time. The women writers discussed in this volume include five from Britain: Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Doris Lessing, and of course Virginia Woolf, the twentieth century stalwart of British novel, who has left her indelible mark on the art of fiction as well as on women writers and feminist thinkers of the subsequent decades. We also get a glimpse of the entire corpus of writers engaged with the ‘feminist theatre’ of America today, in addition to two African-American talents, i.e. Toni Morrison, the Nobel Laureate for literature in 1993, and Alice Walker, the eminent Black American woman writer, and a host of contemporary Indian writers, particularly with reference to their recent work, including Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Shobhaa De, Manju Kapur, Nayantara Sahgal, as well as two émigré Indian writers—Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri. Since most of the authors discussed in these articles are prescribed in the English syllabus in the universities of India, both the teachers and the students will find them extremely useful, and the general readers who are interested in literature in English and/or women writers will also find them intellectually stimulating.

Table of Contents:
1. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Study in Repression and Hysteria –S.P. SWAIN 2. “The Drug of Dreams”: Charlotte Behind Jane Eyre –K.M. JAN 3. A Critique on The Mill on the Floss –MRINAL KANTI CHATTOPADHYAY 4. Virginia Woolf: Impressionistic Heritage of Laurence Sterne –VERA TCHEBINEVA 5. Love with a Fruit-Dish: A Study of To the Lighthouse –LILIANE LOUVEL 6. Revisiting Woolf’s Room after the Third Wave –RAJESH KUMAR SHARMA 7. The Unexplored Universe of Doris Lessing –N. SHARADA IYER 8. From Alienation to Identification: A Study of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple –S.P. SWAIN and SARBAJIT DAS 9. Loss of Self: A Study of Morrison’s Beloved –S.P. SWAIN and SARBAJIT DAS 10. Gender, Race and Class Consciousness in Morrison’s Tar Baby –M.L. JADHAV 11. Challenging the Patriarchy –VERA SHAMINA 12. Modern Indo-Anglo Women Writing: Quest for Equality –PUSHP LATA 13. Women in Quest for Sexual Freedom and Emancipation in Anita Desai’s Fictions –KH. KUNJO SINGH 14. Occidental Quest for Oriental Spiritualism in Jhabvala’s Three Continents and Desai’s Journey to Ithaca –ANITA MYLES 15. Arundhati Roy: A Protest Novelist –RAHMAT JAHAN 16. The God of Small Things as Expression of Social Structure –PRAKASH CHANDRA PRADHAN 17. ‘Dreams to Doom’ in Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters –BINOD MISHRA 18. Obsession to Ovation: A Thematic Study of Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman –BINOD MISHRA 19. Lesser Breeds: A Post Colonial Reading –CHANDRIKA KAMATH 20. Anatomy of Change and the Problems of the Self: A Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter –S.P. SWAIN 21. Problems of Identity: A Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters –S.P. SWAIN 22. Quest for Identity in Immigrant Sensibility: A Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters –BHAGABAT NAYAK 23. Cultural Dilemmas and Displacements of Immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake –TEJINDER KAUR ‘O, Those Extraordinary Women!’ Contributors