The Feminist Companion to Literature in English

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]