Women Writers Project

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Women Writers Project is an initiative based at Brown University, with the aim of making texts by pre-Victorian women writers more accessible. The eventual goal of the project is to make available all English language works written or co-authored by women up to 1850. At present the focus is on works that are otherwise difficult to obtain.

The project began in 1986 and initially published texts in traditional print form. In the mid-1990s the project engaged in research concerning systems for encoding texts in electronic form, based on the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative. "Women Writers Online", the project's electronic archive of texts, was launched in 1999. Access to Women Writers Online is available to paid subscribers through a web-based interface.

As of August 2005 Women Writers Online contains over 230 texts dating from 1526 to 1850 by over 110 authors, including Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, Queen Elizabeth I, Margaret Fell, Felicia Hemans, Catherine Parr, and Mary Sidney.