The Oxford Book of Women’s Writing, Signed Custom Harcourt Binding

Binding Details:  Custom leather binding by the Harcourt Bindery, Charlestown, Massachusetts bound in morocco three-quarter leather over complimentary cloth covered boards that has raised bands to the spine, gilt titling, and gilt ruling. There are gilt rules to the cover and corners, marbled endpapers, hand-sewn silk headbands, and gold gilted top page ends. The Harcourt Bindery label appears on the bottom of the last free endpaper.

Book Details:  Published by the Oxford University Press in 1995, this is a first edition of The Oxford Book of Women’s Writing in the United States. From the publisher, “Provocative and compulsively readable, lively, engaging, and brilliantly representative, The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States presents short stories, poems, essays, plays, speeches, performance pieces, erotica, diaries, correspondence, and even a few recipes from nearly one hundred of our best women writers.

Reveling in the awareness that the best U.S. women's writing is, quite simply, some of the best in the world, editors Linda Wagner-Martin and Cathy N. Davidson have chosen selections spanning four centuries and reflecting the rich variety of American women's lives. The collection embraces the perspectives of age and youth, the traditional and the revolutionary, the public and the private. Here is Judith Sargent Murray's 1790 essay "On the Equality of the Sexes," journalist Martha Gellhorn's "Last Words on Vietnam, 1987," and Mary Gordon's homage to the ghosts of Ellis Island, "More Than Just a Shrine"; powerful short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Wharton, Cynthia Ozick, and Toni Morrison; letters from Abigail Adams, Sarah Moore Grimke[accent], Emma Goldman, and Georgia O'Keeffe; Alice B. Toklas's recipe "Bass for Picasso," and erotic offerings from Anais Nin and Rita Mae Brown. The moving autobiography of Zitkala- Sa[accent], whose mother was a Sioux, tells us more about "otherness" than any sociological treatise, while Janice Mirikitani's and Nellie Wong's poems about being young Asian-American women, like Alice Walker's meditation on the beauty of growing old, speak to all readers.

A thought-provoking introduction and descriptive headnotes explore the history of women's writing in ways that help the reader to understand the American women who have used language to change their worlds and to remember the past, and as a means of etching their deepest, fondest dreams. A joy to read, The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States is filled with eye-opening and unexpected selections. It is the perfect book for anyone fascinated by women's writing and women's lives.”

The book measures 8.5” x 5.75” with 596 pages that includes an introduction, topical listing of contents, and author’s index

Condition Report: The binding is in FINE condition. Internally, the book is very clean with no signs of previous ownership.

A photograph of the binding appears in the photo section of the listing.