Synopsis Women's Writing: Dialogues with Patriarachy is a collection of essays on the major women writers of the nineteenth century and their questioning of and response to the ideas of the Enlightenment. The essays travel a journey of more than a hundred years, explore the philosophical aspects of novels relegated to the category of 'romance', trace the interconnections between socio-political ideas and the construction of 'femininity' and 'morality' as they excavate the work of writers like Mary Hays and Susan Ferrier. The anthology provokes the reader to question the continuation of a canon which ignores such major figures as Marin Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell. What is it that meets male approval? How far can one rebel without being marginalized? Some of the answers can be found in the work of these writers as they experiment with form, move between fiction and romance and novel, use satire and comedy and deconstruct patriarchal projections about the 'ideal' women. Divided into five sections, the book works through an introductory framework and history, identifies major modes and tropes like the Gothic. Comedy and Anti-Romanticism, moves on to individual author and individual texts, before turning, in the fourth section, to two contemporary creative writers as they look back: Yasmine Gooneratne on Jane Austen and Shashi Deshpande on Elizabeth Gaskell. The final section goes on to include three important essays on the realistic novel, the nature of romance and on the profession of being a woman writer.