This important new critical study explores the main features of contemporary feminist literary criticism in Great Britain, America and France. It shows how feminist critics, while writing out their critical “fathers”, have created innovatory critical strategies in a new literary history. Maggie Humm outlines the general problematics within the field, examines the contribution of such contemporary feminist pioneers as Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, and analyzes the techniques of linguistics and psychoanalysis, Marxist-feminism, myth criticism, black and lesbian criticism. The second part of the book focuses on Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West and Adrienne Rich, placing particular emphasis on the relationship in their work between the intellectual theories of the time, as created by men, and their own feminist voices. Maggie Humm suggests that this, together with the range of feminist ideas, makes feminist literary criticism more than simply an addition to literary criticism – it is a radical and more important body of knowledge.