During the last few centuries women writers have considerably widened and deepened the areas of human experience—with their sharp, feminine perception of life successfully transmuted into verbal artifact. The world body of literature in English would have been much poorer today but for the contribution of women writers. The new series—Studies in Women Writers in English—is a grateful acknowledgment of that contribution and public recognition of their voice.
The twenty-three essays included in this fourth volume of the series cover a wide spectrum of women writers across space and time. The women writers discussed in this volume include five from Britain: Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Doris Lessing, and of course Virginia Woolf, the twentieth century stalwart of British novel, who has left her indelible mark on the art of fiction as well as on women writers and feminist thinkers of the subsequent decades. We also get a glimpse of the entire corpus of writers engaged with the ‘feminist theatre’ of America today, in addition to two African-American talents, i.e. Toni Morrison, the Nobel Laureate for literature in 1993, and Alice Walker, the eminent Black American woman writer, and a host of contemporary Indian writers, particularly with reference to their recent work, including Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Shobhaa De, Manju Kapur, Nayantara Sahgal, as well as two émigré Indian writers—Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri.
Since most of the authors discussed in these articles are prescribed in the English syllabus in the universities of India, both the teachers and the students will find them extremely useful, and the general readers who are interested in literature in English and/or women writers will also find them intellectually stimulating.
Mohit K. Ray, recently retired from Burdwan University, is one of the seniormost Professors of English in the country. He has three books and a large number of research papers published in scholarly journals in India and abroad, which reflect his wide range of scholarship including Criticism, Comparative Literature, New Literature, Canonical Literature, Comparative Poetics and Translation Studies.
Professor Ray has attended and chaired sessions as an invited participant in many International Conferences, Seminars, and Colloquia held in different parts of the globe—England, France, Portugal, Austria, Finland, Estonia, America, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong etc.
Professor Ray has studied several languages including Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, French and German etc.
He has edited several anthologies of critical studies, and edits The Atlantic Critical Review, an international quarterly of global circulation.
Professor Ray is a distinguished member of many international bodies including Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, Paris, and Association Internationale des Critiques Littéraires, Paris.
Professor Ray is at present the Chief Editor of English Literature, Atlantic Publishers and Distributors.
Rama Kundu is a full Professor of English. She has been teaching in the Postgraduate Department of English, Burdwan University, West Bengal, since 1976. She is the author of three books: Vision and Design in Hardy’s Fiction, Wrestling with God: Studies in English Devotional Poetry, and a Bengali book Anandamath O Sampradaikta on Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. She has also edited an anthology of research papers on Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World, a collection of essays on Thomas Hardy, and a volume of critical studies on Indian Writing in English, in addition to translating a volume of poems into English—On the Revolving Stage. She has written a large number of research papers published in scholarly journals and anthologies in India and abroad. Professor Kundu has participated and chaired sessions in a large number of National and International Seminars and Conferences including seven stints in Europe.
