Find Women Writers
Consider using Kirstyn Leuner's project, The Stainforth Library of Women's Writing, to discover women writers to work on, use their person authority records to identify some resources to find biographical information, and after the workshop, enjoy their writing!
Another great collection of women's writing for inspiration can be found in Women Writers Online, published by the Women Writers Project at Northeastern University. Focusing on early women’s writing in English, the collection includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible.
Research Librarian for English & Digital Humanities
Assistant Director of Scholars' Lab Public Services
Print Reference Titles
We own many reference titles in print as well -- we will bring a few along to the workshop on Thursday. Some examples:
The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain by ISBN: 1118396987Publication Date: 2017Bringing together scholarship on multilingual and intercultural medieval Britain like never before, The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain comprises over 600 authoritative entries spanning key figures, contexts and influences in the literatures of Britain from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries.
The Encyclopedia of British Literature, 1660-1789 by ISBN: 1444330209Publication Date: 2015Provides a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the poetry, drama, fiction, and literary and cultural criticism produced from the Restoration of the English monarchy to the onset of the French Revolution.
The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature by ISBN: 1118405382Publication Date: 2015Spans the full sweep of literary genres and figures that define this influential period.
Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing, 1900-1950 by ISBN: 9781403916921Publication Date: 2006This study provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging resource which includes information on many previously neglected British women writers (novelists, poets, dramatists, autobiographers) and topics.
Encyclopedia of Women's Autobiography by ISBN: 9780313327377Publication Date: 2005Women have been writing about their lives for hundreds of years, and their autobiographical works are a record of the eras and cultures in which they lived.
BWWC2023 Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
Your Hosts:
Alison Booth, UVA English Dept. & UVA Library Scholars' Lab
Laura Miller, UVA Library Scholars' Lab
Sherri Brown, UVA Library
Lane Rasberry, UVA School of Data Science
Kirstyn Leuner, Dept. of English, Santa Clara University
Workshop info and Introduction to Wikipedia editing
View a digital copy of the BWWC 2023 Wikipedia Edit-a-thon handout.
Also available is a list of named women writers in the BWWC 2023 conference program.
The first five minutes of this video from the Wikimedia Community Ireland will show you how to sign up for an account for editing on Wikipedia. Watch longer if you want tips and tricks for getting started with generating content in your sandbox and editing within an existing article.
Biography & Bio-Critical Databases
- Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles This link opens in a new windowOrlando provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. Interacting with these materials creates a dynamic inquiry from any number of perspectives into centuries of women's writing.
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography This link opens in a new windowLives of British persons from the earliest times to the end of the 20th century. IMPORTANT: our access is limited; please click the LOGOUT link when done.
- Dictionary of Irish BiographyThe chronological scope of the DIB extends from the earliest times to the twenty-first century. The living are not included.
- Collective Biographies of Women This link opens in a new windowA database and bibliography of 14,000 short biographies of historical women printed in 1270 English-language books, primarily 1830-1940. Explore trends in versions of women's lives and the social networks formed by biographical collections.
- Dictionary of Literary Biography This link opens in a new windowDLB traces the lives and careers of selected authors, critics, screenwriters, journalists, scholars, and publishers from all eras and genres, with lists of recommended books and articles. Search for the author you want and choose the Biographies tab.
- Columbia Granger's World of Poetry This link opens in a new windowFull text of over 250,000 poems, mostly in English, but also including poems in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Information about and citations from thousands more poems, plus biographies of poets and analyses of poems.
- World Biographical Information System This link opens in a new windowWBIS Online is the most comprehensive biographical database available, providing biographical information on over 6 Million people from the 8th century B.C. to the present. Included are 8.5 Million digital facsimile articles from biographical reference works.
Find Historical Newspapers & Periodicals
The following resources will allow for searching in historical periodicals (some include newspapers along with other serials).
- Women's Magazine Archive This link opens in a new windowAn archival research resource comprising the backfiles of leading women's interest consumer magazines. Issues are scanned in high-resolution color and feature detailed article-level indexing. Coverage ranges from the late-19th century through to 2005 and these key primary sources permit the examination of the events, trends, and attitudes of this period. Among the research fields served by this material are gender studies, social history, economics/marketing, media, fashion, politics, and popular culture.
- British Periodicals This link opens in a new windowThis database provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of periodicals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, comprising millions of high-resolution facsimile page images. Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the social sciences, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture
- Eighteenth Century Journals This link opens in a new windowBringing together rare journals printed between c.1685 and 1835, this resource illuminates all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life in five modules. Topics covered are wide-ranging and include colonial life, provincial and rural affairs, the French and American revolutions, reviews of literature and fashion throughout Europe, political debates, and London coffee house gossip and discussion.
- Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive This link opens in a new windowThe complete online fully-searchable edition of the TLS from the first edition in 1902 through 2019. Among over 300,000 reviews, letters, poems, and articles, users will find the contemporary criticism of scholars such as Christopher Ricks and George Steiner, the reviews of award-winning novels of A.S. Byatt and Joyce Carol Oates, and the philosophical works of Thomas Nagel, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. They can also track the discoveries of explorers Redmond O'Hanlon and Robin Hanbury-Tenison.
- Interwar Culture This link opens in a new windowInterwar Culture showcases popular and lesser-known periodicals published during the interwar period. With articles covering culture, entertainment, fashion, home and family life, world current affairs, class, social and welfare issues, these historically significant and highly visual magazines provide a rich insight into these dynamic yet turbulent decades, as well as allowing examination of a burgeoning media industry that both shaped and reflected society.
- LGBT Magazine Archive This link opens in a new windowArchival runs of 26 of the most influential, longest-running serial publications covering LGBT interests. Includes the pre-eminent US and UK titles – The Advocate and Gay Times, respectively. Chronicles more than six decades of the history and culture of the LGBT community.
- Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new windowLists articles from scholarly and popular periodicals covering dance, film, television, theater, opera, stagecraft, broadcast arts, storytelling and more. Some journals include full text.
The following resources will allow for searching in historical newspapers.
- 17th & 18th Century NICHOLS Collection of UK Newspapers This link opens in a new windowThe 17th and 18th Century Nichols Newspapers Collection features the newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and broadsheets that form the Nichols newspaper collection held at the Bodleian library in Oxford, UK. All 296 volumes of bound material, covering the period 1672-1737 are presented in digitized format here.
- 19th Century British Newspapers This link opens in a new windowSearchable full text and page images of 48 national and regional British newspapers.
- British Library Newspapers This link opens in a new windowIncludes parts I-V. Sourced from the extensive holdings of the British Library, British Library Newspapers delivers a wide range of irreplaceable local and regional voices to reflect the social, political, and cultural events of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
- Burney Collection Newspapers This link opens in a new window1,270 newspapers and news pamphlets from the United Kingdom from the 17th and 18th centuries.
- Times Digital Archive This link opens in a new windowThe full text of the Times of London from 1785-1985.
Specialized Biographical Ebooks
Below are examples of themed biographical compilations accessible as ebooks at UVA.
A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen by ISBN: 1315440709Publication Date: 2016From the exemplary to the notorious to the obscure, this comprehensive and innovative encyclopedia showcases the worthy women of early modern England. Poets, princesses, or pirates, the women of power and agency found in these pages are indeed worth knowing, and this volume will introduce many female figures to even the most established scholars in early modern studies. Rather than using the conventional alphabetical format of the standard biographical encyclopedia, this volume is divided into categories of women. Since many women will fit in more than one category, each woman is placed in the category that best exemplifies her life, and is cross referenced in other appropriate sections. This structure makes the book an interesting read for seasoned scholars of early modern women, while students need not already be familiar with these subjects in order to benefit from the text.
Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century by ISBN: 9783319567501Publication Date: 2017This book is an investigation of the biases, contradictions, errors, ambiguities, gaps, and historical contexts in biographies of controversial British women who published during the long nineteenth century, many of them left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. Fourteen scholars analyze the agenda, problems, and strengths of biographical material, highlighting the flaws, deficiencies, and influences that have distorted the portraits of women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Sydney Owenson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Lady Florence Dixie, George Eliot, and Edith Simcox. Through exposing distortions, this fascinating study demonstrates that biographies are often more about the biographer than they are about the biographee and that they are products of the time in which they are written.
A Historical Dictionary of British Women by ISBN: 9781857432282Publication Date: 2003This reference book, containing the biographies of more than 1,100 notable British women from Boudicca to Barbara Castle, is an absorbing record of female achievement spanning some 2,000 years of British life.
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Eighteenth-Century Writers and Writing, 1660 - 1789 by ISBN: 1405156694Publication Date: 2011The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Eighteenth-Century Writers and Writing,1660-1789 features coverage of the lives and works of almost 500 notable writers based in the British Isles from the return of the British monarchy in 1660 until the French Revolution of 1789. Broad coverage of writers and texts presents a new picture of 18th-century British authorship. Takes advantage of newly expanded eighteenth-century canon to include significantly more women writers and labouring-class writers than have traditionally been studied. Draws on the latest scholarship to more accurately reflect the literary achievements of the long eighteenth century
