Questioning what characterizes twentieth-century writing by women, Judith Gardiner posits an imaginative theoretical model for women's reading and writing. She focuses on three major authors--Jean Rhys (1890-1979), Christina Stead (1902-83), and Doris Lessing (1919-)--and traces the interactions among empathy, history, and female identity in their fiction. Her analysis reveals that by adopting the positions of mother's daughter, father's son, and self-originating child with respect to literary traditions, these writers solve a common conundrum about female identity at mid-century. The author demonstrates that the distinctive characteristics of women's literature lie not in specialized content or style but in the entire ensemble of gendered relationships among a writer, her characters, and her readers. Gardiner's "politics of empathy" points to strategies for engagement across difference, accessible to men as well as to women and hopeful of bridging the gaps between teaching and criticism, reading and writing, and representation and action. JUDITH KEGAN GARDINER, Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is author of Craftsmanship in Context: The Development of Ben Jonson's Poetry and of numerous studies in twentieth-century women writers, Renaissance English literature, and psychoanalytic, materialist, and feminist literary theory. EVERYWOMAN: STUDIES IN HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND CULTURE Susan Gubar and Joan Hoff-Wilson, general editors