The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism brings unique literary, critical and historical perspectives to the relationship between women's writing and women's rights in British contexts from the late eighteenth century to the present.

Rachel Carroll is Associate Professor in English at Teesside University, UK. She is the author of Transgender and the Literary Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing (2018) and Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction (2012).

Fiona Tolan is Reader in Contemporary Women's Writing at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. She is the author of The Fiction of Margaret Atwood (2022) and Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (2007).

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: "Writing Women's Rights - from Enlightenment to Ecofeminism"

Part I: Rights

• Like Nobody Else: women and independence in the novels of Charlotte Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft

• Romantic Women Travel Writers, Politics and the Environment: An ecofeminist reading of the Swiss landscape

• Feminism and Animal Advocacy in the Long Nineteenth Century: Anne Brontë and the 'abuses of society'

• "They all revolved about her": Disability, femininity and power in mid-Victorian women's writing

• The "quest for harmony"? Utopia, matriarchal communities and feminist self-critique

• Jan Morris and the Territory Between: Interrogating nation and normality in contemporary Welsh trans writing

Part II: Networks

• "Men shall not make us foes": Charlotte Brontë's letters and her female friendship networks

• Transatlantic Feminism and Antislavery Activism: Women's networks, letter writing and literature in the long nineteenth century

• Forgotten Feminist Fiction: Netta Syrett, New Woman writing and women's suffrage

• "It was little more than a dining club": Examining the epistolary networks of Willa Muir and Helen B. Cruickshank in the founding of Scottish PEN

• "What means a frontier?": Nancy Cunard, feminist internationalism and the Spanish Civil War

Part III: Bodies

• Reputation of [her] Pen: Retrieving the black female body from the margins of the page and the stage

• "We wear the bandages, but our limbs have not grown to them": Eugenic feminism and female economic dependence in Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• Lesbian-Trans-Feminist Modernism and Sexual Science: Irene Clyde and Urania

• "Beauty in Revolt": Fashioning feminists in Rebecca West and Jean Rhys

• "The rule of three": Textual triads, trialogues and women's voices in Sylvia Plath, Jackie Kay and debbie tucker green

• HANSON, Clare: Feminism, Eugenics and Genetics: From convergence to contestation

Part IV: Production

• "O Happiness, thou pleasing dream, / Where is thy substance found?": Anne Steele's public and private eighteenth-century writings on happiness

• "Dearest Norah...": The professional and personal relationships forged between an editor and her authors

• Feminist citation in Buchi Emecheta's Early Fiction and Autobiography: Publishing race, class, and gender

• "Working with cloth": Materialising women's creative labour in the work of Rosamond Lehmann, Beryl Bainbridge and Joan Riley

• "To the sisters I always wanted": Women, writers' groups and print culture in Glasgow, 1980-1988

• Mother Country: Leonora Brito writes Wales - black British identity, maternity and memory in the Welsh short story

Part V: Activism

• In a Circle with Mary Hays: Writing novels to reform society in the 1790s

• In the Advance Guard of Victorian Literary Feminism: The actress as independent woman and social reformer in Eliza Lynn's Realities: A Tale (1851)

• "Rice puddings, made without milk": Mother Seacole reforms 'home habits' in the Crimea.

• "Your Great Adventure is to report her faithfully": The centring of women's voices and stories in suffrage theatre

• A Life Can Be a Manifesto: Connecting Bernadine Evaristo to a history of feminist manifestos

• Open Clasp as an example of feminist theatre practice

• Protecting the Land, Safeguarding the Future: Ecofeminism, activist women's writing and contemporary publishing in Wales