from inside cover flap: In March of 1973 Germaine Bree author and critic, delivered the twentieth annual series of Brown and Haley lectures at the University of Puget Sound. She was the first woman to contribute to this distinguished series, and her three lectures were brilliantly successful. Their audiences recognized the playful and witty tone in which they were set no less than the originality and critical acumen of their substance. This volume recreates the precision and immediacy of the original lectureship. The author surprisingly and successfully takes the reader back, initially to the women writers of the late medieval and Renaissance centuries in France, ...The second section of the book deals with women writers' position and accomplishment in the years before and after World War I, ...In the final section she analyzes the situation in today's world: ... - from Amzon