Women Writers Online

Brown University Women Writers Project

Women Writers Online (WWO) is a full-text database of pre-Victorian women's writing that contains more than 200 English texts in a broad interdisciplinary range of subjects and genres.

Description:

In 2006, Women Writers Online migrated to a new technical platform, powered by the University of Chicago's PhiloLogic software, which enables users to expand their search and analysis functions dramatically. In July 2005, various new texts were added including works by Frances Brooke, Hannah Kilham, Rachel Prescott, Margaret Cavendish, Ann Judson, Jarena Lee, Phyllis Wheatley, Anne Bullard, and Lady Mary Wroth.

Renaissance Women Online (RWO), a special subset of the collection and included with the subscription, features 100 Renaissance texts by women, representing a wide range of genres and topics, with accompanying biographical and contextual essays by some of the foremost scholars in the field. Like WWO, RWO is fully searchable at the level of the whole collection, a single text, or specific groups of texts identified by the reader. The texts provide a broad cross-section of women's literate culture in the Renaissance period, including religious expression, poetry, political commentary, history, personal memoirs, fiction, medical texts, and domestic manuals.

Women Writers Online is one of the most successful independent  scholarly resources available online. Produced and published by the Women Writers Project at Brown University, WWO offers access to a large collection of pre-Victorian women's writing in English. Every work is presented in full, with detailed bibliographic information, and the interface offers novice and expert users powerful search and viewing options. With its broadly interdisciplinary range of subjects and genres, the collection is a valuable resource for any course in women's writing, English literature before 1850, or cultural history.

More Information:

The Brown University Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. Its goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader. It supports research on women's writing, text encoding, and the role of electronic texts in teaching and scholarship.

The site is the chief point of access to the WWP's research and projects. From the searchable catalog you can find bibliographic information about all WWP texts, including those not yet available, and order draft printouts. 

For more information, go to The Brown University Women Writers Project or lookup announcements about the product.

Subscription Term:

The annual subscription term runs from July 1 through June 30. New subscriptions may begin on the 1st of any month and will be prorated through the end of June.

Free Trial:

To initiate a trial, send email to WWP@brown.edu or call 401.863.3619.

Individuals requesting trial access should include their name, address, institutional affiliation (if applicable), and a password. Institutional requests should include a list of IP addresses.