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 country—ranging from doyens like Kamala Das, Bapsi Sidhwa, Shashi Deshpande and Anita Desai—to 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.

Table of Contents:
General Preface; Preface; 1. Wuthering Heights: A Re-assessment—Bidya Nath Jha; 2. Incorporated Styles in Virginia Woolf’s Short Stories—Behzad Pourgharib; 3. Mothers and Children in Two Poems by Mina Loy—Pilar Sánchez Calle; 4. Painter vs Model: Christina Rossetti and Carol Ann Duffy in Comparison—Carla Fusco; 5. The Chemistry Behind Creativity: A Reading of Sylvia Plath—Nandini Sahu; 6. No Separation Between Life and Art: Poetry of Jane Kenyon—Santosh K. Padhy; 7. Different Shades of Love and Betrayal: A Study of Toni Morrison’s Love—Monika Gupta; 8. The Novels of Jean Rhys as Studies in Inverted Odyssey—Chaitali Gorai; 9. Human Values in Toru Dutt’s Ancient Ballads—Kalpana Rajput; 10. Nectar in a Sieve: A Study of the Interwoven Themes—Manjari Jhunjhunwala; 11. ‘Indian Womanhood’ in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve—S. John Peter Joseph; 12. Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man as a Partition Novel—Mallikarjun Patil; 13. The Pattern of Despair and Delight in Anita Desai’s Where Shall We Go This Summer?—Shiva Shankar Jha; 14. Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terror as a Feminist Text—Mallikarjun Patil; 15. ‘Historical’ Past and ‘Personal’ Past in the Poetry of Kamala Das—Purnendu Chatterjee; 16. Female Protagonists in Tehmina Durrani’s Blasphemy and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things—Loveleen Mohan; 17. Anglophilia in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things—Ahmad M.S. Abu Baker; 18. Arundhati Roy’s “The End of Imagination”: A Study—Vinod Kumar Singh and Anjani Kumar Mishra; 19. Power Loom: Locating Arundathi Roy in the Development Discourse—N.K. Rajalakshmi; 20. Quest for Self and Immigrant Psyche in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter—Ram Sharma; 21. Quest for Identity in Immigrant Sensibility: A Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters—Bhagabat Nayak; Contributors