Eve Bites Back

Eve Bites Back looks at the lives and work of eight women writers to tell a different story of English literature. Anna Beer follows these figures through their careers and personal histories, revealing a literary past that has often been overlooked.

From the fourteenth century to the present day, women who wrote were routinely regarded as unstable, unruly or threatening. Those who wrote anyway had to devise ways to work around or resist these assumptions. Some were careful and discreet, while others simply ignored the disapproval. Beer shows that each of them, whatever their approach, led a full, busy and frequently contested life.

The book brings the women who were contemporaries of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton into the foreground of English literary history, and recounts scandalous attachments and bold undertakings along the way. Its subjects include Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Bradstreet, as well as Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montagu, Jane Austen and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.