BLIncludes selections from The Gleaner, her major work, and other publications As a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray candidly and often humorously asserted her opinions about the social and political conditions of women in late eighteenth-century America. As a committed feminist, she urged American women to enter a `new era in female history', yet published her own writings under a man's name in the hopes of more widely disseminating her ideas.

Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and spent most of her life in New England, where her extraordinary intellectual achievements gained recognition in literary and political circles of the late eighteenth century. Author of "On the Equality of the Sexes" (1790), Murray was one of America's earliest feminist writers and a gifted satirist. She was one of the first women in America to have her own literary column (in Massachusetts Magazine), and the first American to have a play produced on the Boston stage. In addition to writing essays, plays, poetry, and fiction, Murray was a prolific letter writer. Throughout her long career, she focused on the themes of women's education, history, and contributions to American culture. In 1798, one hundred of her essays from Massachusetts Magazine were collected and published in a single volume, The Gleaner. The Selected Writings features Murray's "On the Equality of the Sexes" and other essays from The Gleaner; selected correspondence; a play, The Traveller Returned; and Murray's only novel, The Story of Margaretta. This latest addition to the Women Writers in English series reintroduces an important early feminist voice, one that should engage the intellect and imagination of readers both inside and outside the academy.