The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction

1. Introduction: Histories and heroines: the female figure in contemporary historical fiction
Katherine Cooper, Emma Short

Part I. Historical Women: Revisioning Real Lives

2. The virtuosa and the ventriloquists: Janice Galloway’s Clara

Theresa Jamieson

3. Making up, or making over: Reconstructing the modern female author
Emma Short

4. A deviant device: Diary dissembling in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Kym Brindle

5. Whoso list to hunt’: The literary fortunes of Anne Boleyn
Julie Crane

Part II. Imagined Histories: Romancing Fictional Heroines

6. Do knights still rescue damsels in distress?: Reimagining the medieval in Mills & Boon historical romance
Amy Burge

7. Sexual f(r)ictions: Pornography in neo-Victorian women’s fiction
Nadine Muller

8. Re-claiming Anne Damer/re-covering Sapphic history: Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask

Claire O’Callaghan

9. Things slipping between past and present: Feminism and the gothic in Kate Mosse’s Sepulchre

Katherine Cooper

Part III. Imagined Histories: Romancing Fictional Heroines

10. Imagine. Investigate. Intervene?: A consideration of feminist intent and metafictive invention in the historical fictions of A. S. Byatt and Marina Warner
Siân Harris

11. In defence of fiction: History and imagination in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and The Lieutenant

Anna Gething

12. Difficulties, discontinuities and differences: Reading women’s historical fiction
Diana Wallace

13. Writing historical fiction: Thoughts from two practitioners
Alice Thompson, Susan Sellers

Keywords: Social Sciences, Gender Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literature, general, British and Irish Literature