The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present is a biographical dictionary about women writers.
Companion was edited by Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy. [1] It was published in 1990 by Batsford (now Pavilion Books) in the UK and Yale University Press in the US. [2] It took about ten years to complete and was based mainly on research completed specifically for the project. [1] [3]
Companion includes about 2,700 entries about women writers and associated topics such as genres and literary movements. [1] Only writing in English is covered but the project's geographic scope is wide. [3] Temporally, Companion covers writers from the Middle Ages to about 1985. [4]
Entries focus on biographical details over literary criticism, [5] seeking to show the lives from which women's writing emerged. [6] The editors included entries on writing not typically considered literary, such as diaries and letters, in order to counteract received narratives of what literature can be. [7] Companion emphasizes women's relationships with one another and lists mothers before fathers when describing a subject's parentage. [8]
Collaborators on Companion later created Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present , an online reference source about women's writing published by Cambridge University Press. [9]