Women Writers Updated to 2026
British Library Women Writers The Women Writers series from British Library Publishing brings back and contextualises novels by authors who were successful in their day. Through powerful storytelling, these novels portray issues that women faced during the twentieth century and highlight society’s changing attitudes toward female behaviour through the decades. Launched in 2020, the series now comprises over 30 titles which encompass satirical musings on ageing, parallel narratives, body swaps, fictionalised depictions of true crime, coming-of-age stories, and reflections on singledom, sex, marriage and infidelity. More recently, anthologies have been successfully introduced, bringing together new collections of short stories by well-known and forgotten authors that span the twentieth century. This catalogue contains information on the latest titles released in 2025 and 2026, together with bibliographic details on previously published titles available to order from British Library Publishing. Each novel includes a new preface, an author biography, a chronology of the significant events during the decade of the novel’s setting or publication and an afterword discussing the key issues in the story. Prefaces are written by British Library curators and modern female authors. The Afterwords are written by Series Consultant Simon Thomas, who created the middlebrow fiction blog Stuck in a Book in 2007. The site receives more than 10,000 visitors each month. Simon hosts other book-blogging projects such as A Century of Books. He is also the co-host of the popular podcast Tea or Books? Simon has a PhD from Oxford University in Interwar Literature and lives in Oxfordshire. stuckinabook.com @stuck_inabook
New British Library Women Writers 2026
Stories for the 12 Days of Christmas
Jeanette Winterson, Patricia Highsmith, Sylvia Townsend Warner and many more, with a Foreword by Kate Mosse In medieval times, Christmas was not a single day but an extended festival incorporating saints’ days and feast days, beginning on 25 December and ending on 5 January. Stories for the 12 Days of Christmas seeks to revive this ritual period through a carefully curated selection of stories by female writers, which map these ancient celebrations onto their twentieth-century equivalents. With an original foreword by Kate Mosse, these are stories of feasting, misrule and epiphanies, served up alongside the perennial joys of the season: love, family, and embracing new beginnings. Paperback with flaps £10.99 ISBN 9780712369909 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm September 2026
This new anthology brings together the creative minds of: Patricia Highsmith Jeanette Winterson Sylvia Townsend Warner Lucy Maud Montgomery Eleanor Farjeon Ursula Bloom and more
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Women Writers 2026
From Patricia Highsmith, the lordly charity of Boxing Day becomes the ill-conceived festive whims of a socialite, while Jeanette Winterson revives the Dickensian orphan story for Childermas. Elsewhere, a group of hard-up artists host an unexpected Christmas feast for their Hampstead neighbourhood, a flapper in 1920s New York decides not to party on New Year’s Eve and a free-thinking family welcomes a mysterious Lord of Misrule into their snowed-in farmhouse.
The Spring House
Cynthia Asquith, with a Foreword by Joanna Quinn
It is 1915, and Miranda Gray is spending the war on the other side of the Atlantic to her Canadian husband. Staying with her eccentric relatives and young son at her family’s stately home, Star Cross, Miranda struggles to find her wartime role. Is she the stoic wife of a distant military man, the duty-bound nurse, the promiscuous society hostess, reluctant muse to a pacifist poet, a mother, a sister, a daughter, or some amalgamation of all? Gradually, as the war brings death and destruction to those closest to her, Miranda is offered a glimpse of something beyond these stilted roles – a chance at real love. Paperback with flaps £10.99 ISBN 9780712355049 304 pages, 190 x 130 mm June 2026
Cynthia Asquith (1887–1960) was an author and socialite, best known for her supernatural stories and close friendships with prominent authors such as D. H. Lawrence and J. M. Barrie. The Spring House was her first novel. She also wrote biographies and children’s books and edited a well-known anthology of supernatural stories called The Ghost Book. In 1910 she married Herbert Dixon Asquith, the son of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith.
The Spring House artfully balances humour and devastation; at once a deftly written psychological portrait and a social document revealing the slow birth of the twentieth century and the new woman. Republished for the first time since its original release in 1936, this edition features an original foreword by Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theatre.
Women Writers 2026
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Stories for Lovers Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Taylor and many more
Stories for Mothers and Daughters A. S. Byatt, Jamaica Kincaid, E. M. Delafield and many more
Fall head over heels with this collection of unconventional and heartfelt romances. Women writers of the twentieth century had a complex relationship with romantic fiction, at once limited and legitimised by the often-denigrated category of ‘love story’. From tentative first dates to honeymoon bliss and chance meetings on trains, the heady rush of falling in love infuses these stories. But there are few fairy-tale endings here: a woman shares the gothic tale of her first love, the rekindling of an old flame is complicated by the baggage of two lifetimes, and a musician conducts an extramarital affair with calculated precision.
From forthright mothers and very modern daughters to the quiet dreamers on either side of the generational divide, this anthology sketches a joyous, fraught, and ultimately tender portrait of mother-daughter relationships throughout the twentieth century. Across the decades, women writers return to perpetual teenage daughters that rebel against the specter of maternal tradition and mothers who start to see their own mothers’ shadows on the wall. Brought together in this collection is a moving testament to the inextricable and ineffable bond between mothers and daughters, in all its lovely and imperfect forms.
Paperback £10.99 ISBN 9780712355537 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm January 2026
Paperback £10.99 ISBN 9780712355377 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm February 2025
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Previous British Library Women Writers
The Woman in the Hall G. B. Stern
The Spring Begins Katherine Dunning
Lady Living Alone Norah Lofts
Paperback with flaps £10.99 ISBN 9780712355230 352 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £10.99 ISBN 9780712355971 272 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712355124 208 pages, 190 x 130 mm
The Camomile
Stories for Summer
Forest Silver
And Days by the Pool
E. M. Ward
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712355070 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712355155 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712355803 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Catherine Carswell
A Lake District Story
Women Writers 7
Stories for Winter
Introduction to Sally
One Year’s Time
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712354691 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712354745 272 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712354578 288 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Sing Me Who You Are
The Home
Stories for Christmas
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712354875 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712354929 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
And Nights by the Fire
Elizabeth von Arnim
Penelope Mortimer
And the Festive Season
Elizabeth Berridge
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Women Writers
Angela Milne
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712354523 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
War Among Ladies
Keeping Up Appearances
Eleanor Scott
Rose Macaulay
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712354622 288 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712354011 288 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712354950 208 pages, 190 x 130 mm
A Pin to See the Peepshow
Which Way?
The Love Child
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353595 400 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353984 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Theodora Benson
Strange Journey
Maud Cairnes
Edith Olivier
F. Tennyson Jesse
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353649 208 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Women Writers 9
Mamma
Tension
Diana Tutton
E. M. Delafield
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353045 288 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353885 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353939 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
O, The Brave Music
Tea is So Intoxicating
Father
Dorothy Evelyn Smith
Mary Essex
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353380 320 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353625 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353182 304 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Sally on the Rocks Winifred Boggs
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Women Writers
Elizabeth von Arnim
Dangerous Ages
Chatterton Square
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353878 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353229 368 pages, 190 x 130 mm
My Husband Simon
The Tree of Heaven
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353120 224 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Paperback with flaps £9.99 ISBN 9780712353076 320 pages, 190 x 130 mm
Rose Macaulay
Mollie Panter-Downes
E. H. Young
May Sinclair
Women Writers 11
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Front cover by Sinem Erkas. Specifications, prices and covers in this catalogue are subject to change prior to publication. A catalogue of forthcoming titles and catalogues of backlist fiction in the British Library Crime Classics, Tales of the Weird and Gilded Nightmares series may be viewed alongside this catalogue online at issuu.com/bl_publishing