This book reveals the importance of personal letters in the history of European women between the year 1000 and the advent of the telephone. It explores the changing ways that women used correspondence for self-expression and political mobilization over this period, enabling them to navigate the myriad gendered restrictions that limited women’s engagement in the world. Whether written from the medieval cloister, or the renaissance court, or the artisan’s workshop, or the drawing room, letters crossed geographical and social distance and were mobile in ways that women themselves could not always be. Women wrote to govern, to argue, to plead, and to demand. They also wrote to express love and intimacy, and in so doing, to explain and to understand themselves. This book argues that the personal letter was a crucial place for European women’s self-fashioning, and that exploring the history of their letters offers a profound insight into their subjectivity and agency over time.

Latin American women have long written essays on topics ranging from gender identity and the female experience to social injustice, political oppression, lack of educational opportunities, and the need for female solidarity in a patriarchal environment. But this rich vein of writing has often been ignored and is rarely studied.

This volume of twenty-one original studies by noted experts in Latin American literature seeks to recover and celebrate the accomplishments of Latin American women essayists. Taking a variety of critical approaches, the authors look at the way women writers have interpreted the essay genre, molded it to their expression, and created an intellectual tradition of their own. Some of the writers they treat are Flora Tristan, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Victoria Ocampo, Alfonsina Storni, Rosario Ferré, Christina Peri Rossi, and Elena Poniatowska.

This book is the first of a two-volume project that reexamines the Latin American essay from a feminist perspective. The second volume, also edited by Doris Meyer, contains thirty-six essays in translation by twenty-two women authors.