English Literature

By Lorna Sage.
Advisory editors: Germaine Greer, Elaine Showalter. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
With more than 2,500 alphabetically-arranged entries, this work is a useful quick-reference guide to women writers, their works, and the movements they have been a part of, such as postmodernism. From medieval writers such as Julian of Norwich to post-colonial writers such as Arundhati Roy, this guide covers a wide range of authors, literary periods and works.

Edited by Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
Consisting of 2,700 alphabetically-arranged biographical entries on women writing in English from the earliest days to approximately 1985, this book also contains subject entries ranging from detective fiction and psychoanalytic feminist criticism to religious and devotional writing. This work has three useful indexes at the end of the book organized by topic (e.g. popular fiction), date (authors by time period: e.g. "Born 1876-1900"), and surname (providing cross-references to the correct entries).

Edited by Janet M. Todd.
NY: Continuum, 1989.
Unlike the The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English and the The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, this reference lacks subject entries. The advantage, however, of British Women Writers is its detailed biographies on more than 400 British women writers from the Middle Ages to the 1980s-some not included in the other two sources. British Women Writers covers a fair range of authors, from novelists and poets to writers of books on cookery, religion, history and travel.