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Meet the Authors:

Maria DiBattista and Deborah Epstein Nord

Authors of : "At Home in the World: Women Writers and Public Life, from Austen to the Present".

A bold new literary history that says women's writing is defined less by domestic concerns than by an engagement with public life.

This book explores works by a wide range of writers, including established figures such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Harriet Jacobs, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Toni Morrison; little known writers like Mary Antin, Tess Slesinger, and Martha Gellhorn; and recent and contemporary figures, including Nadine Gordimer, Anita Desai, Edwidge Danticat, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

DiBattista and Nord show how these writers dramatize tensions between home and the wider world through recurrent themes of sailing forth, escape, exploration, dissent, and emigration. Throughout, the book uncovers the undervalued public concerns of women writers who ventured into ever-wider geographical, cultural, and political territories, forging new definitions of what it means to create a home in the world.

The result is an enlightening reinterpretation of women's writing from the early nineteenth century to the present day.

Maria DiBattista and Deborah Epstein Nord are both Professors in the English Department at Princeton University.

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