The Beth Book

Written - as its central character says - "for women and not for men", "The Beth Book" presents a picture of a girl-child's dawning sexual awareness, shattering a Victorian conspiracy of silence. Contemporary reviews denounced it for "uncovering sewers" and for the "unwomanly hardness" and "cold-blooded selfishness" of a hero who learns to assert her own interests. A notorious polemicist and suffragist who created the term "New Woman", Sarah Grand was silenced by literary history until the feminist recovery of the 1970s. This new edition makes available for classroom use and for reading pleasure the heroic story of a woman's path to self-determination.