ClassInfo

This class is about wide-ranging books written by English and American women before 1800. Includes The Book of Margery Kempe, a visionary autobiography and memoir that begins with the author's mental breakdown following childbirth; Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World, a narrative about a shipwrecked woman who is made an Empress and charged with creating a utopian world free of war and sexual discrimination; plays written by Aphra Behn, a shadowy figure who worked as a royal spy and supported herself through her writing; poems by the educated Puritan Anne Bradstreet, the first female poet published in both England and the New World; and Mary Rowlandson's story of her eleven week captivity during conflicts between colonists and Native Americans.