All Her Faculties

All Her Faculties focuses on the perpetuation and reflection in literature of particular representations of the female mind that are entrenched in conservative notions of womanhood. The study highlights literature’s incontrovertible power to create myth - the myth of woman as body, not mind - through social practice as well as discourse. This is accentuated in the divergent yet related roles women as scholars play in a number of fictions that have entered, to a greater or lesser degree, the cult