1. Introduction: The Life Apart. 2. Abandoned Women: Female Authorship in the Middle Ages - Marion Wynne-Davies. 3. Transgressing Boundaries: Women's Writing in the Renaissance and Reformation - Janet Clare. 4. Usurping Authority Over the Man: Women's Writing 1630-1689 - Elaine Hobby.

5. Public View: Women's Writing 1689-1789 - Jane Spencer. 6. A Revolution in Female Manners: Women Writers of the Romantic Period 1789-1832 - Harriet Devine Jump. 7. A Woman's Business: Women's Writing 1830-1880 - Lyn Pykett. 8. Out of the Attic: Women and Writing at the Fin de Siecle - Viv Gardner.

9. Looking Within: Women's Writing in the Modernist Period 1910-1940 - Clare Hanson. 10. Writing as Revision: Women's Writing in Britain 1945 to the Present - Diana Wallace.