<p>This important study offers close readings of The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette, considered in feminist, Marxist, and other theoretical and critical contexts.<br/><br/>Penny Boumelha provides astute insights into what it means to write as a woman, and the historically specific nature of this meaning; what it means to read as a feminist; textuality, resistance to patriarchy, and its gender and race-specific forms and the importance of the political concerns of the present in producing feminist readings. She also takes up the important question o for feminist critics of the validity and the uses of interpretation.</p>