Elaine Showalter

The classic story of the March family whose 4 daughters are growing up in New England in the mid-1800s. There are numerous sequels, for example, Little Men and Jo's Boys. Annotation. Little Women is the heartwarming story of the March family that has thrilled generations of readers. It is the story of four sisters--Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth-- and of the courage, humor and ingenuity they display to survive poverty and the absence of their father during...

"Julia Howe (1819 -1910) was a beautiful, studious New York heiress and aspiring poet when she married Bostonian Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, a hero of the Greek war of independence against the Turks and an internationally acclaimed pioneer in the education of the blind. Their marriage united two exceptional people. Together the Howes knew many of the key figures of their era, from Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale in England, to Margaret Fuller,...

Loretta Wendall and her two children experience violence and poverty in Detroit from the Depression in the 1930s to the riots of 1967.

Traces the transformations of themes in women's writings by examining three women author's works.

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...

"In her second novel, Joyce Carol Oates created one of her most memorable heroines, Clara, the beautiful daughter of migrant farmworkers. Intent upon rising above her haphazard life of violence and poverty, Clara struggles for independence while relying on four men to fashion her destiny: her father, a hardened laborer simmering with resentment; Lowry, who rescues the teenage Clara from her family and offers her a first glimpse of love; Revere, the...