Women's Fiction 1945-2005

Deborah Philips is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arts at Brunel University.

• 1. Introduction; 2. 1950s: What did Women want?: Post-war masculinity in the women's novel of the 1950s; (Includes Barbara Cartland, Monica Dickens, Rose Franken, Storm Jameson, Betty MacDonald, Iris Murdoch); 3. 1960s: 'Mothers Without Partners: the single mother narrative; (Includes Lynne Reid Banks, Monica Dickens, Margaret Drabble and Nell Dunn); 4. 1970s: She's Leaving Home: the 'college girl' narrative; (Includes Rita Mae Brown, Rona Jaffe, Deborah Moggach, Andrea Newman Judith Rossner and Alice Walker); 5. 1980s: Shopping as Work: the sex and shopping novel; (Includes Barbara Taylor Bradford, Zoe Fairbairns, Judith Gould, Judith Krantz, Terry McMillan, Danielle Steel, Fay Weldon); 6. 1990s: Keeping the Home Fires Burning: the Aga Saga; (Includes Elizabeth Buchan, Philippa Gregory, Alice Hoffman, Anita Shreve, Adriana Trigiani, Joanna Trollope); 7. 2000: Shopping for Men: the Chick Lit novel. (Includes Helen Fielding, Kathryn Flett, Jane Gordon, Jane Green, Marian Keyes, Caroline Knapp, Freya North); 8. Resentful Daughters: the post-feminist novel?; (Includes Esther Freud, Martha McPhee, Clare Morrell, Kathleen Tessaro, Rebecca Wells); Afterword.

"Deborah Phillips has produced a most welcome addition to the existing critical work on the "woman's novel", which is to say the novel written by women that constructs its readers as feminine...Women's Fiction 1945-2005 uses many of the approaches that we have come to associate with Cultural Studies and offers an enjoyable sense of time travel for those who are old enough to remember the decades in the second half of the twentieth century..." - Maroula Joannou, Contemporary Women's Writing