ACADEMIC - EARLY MODERN PERIOD - WOMEN’S STUDIES - COLONIAL STUDIES - BRITISH EMPIRE - CORRESPONDENCE Women Writing Home will provide texts for specialist academic studies in the arts and humanities, from history to economics, from literature to cultural and gender studies, to investigate with the help of a modern, scholarly editorship, including annotations and introductions, women’s construction of their place and identity in a colonial setting. Women Writing Home assembles, in the most comprehensive edition to date, a wide range of letters from the former British Empire. They will provide an impressive body of texts for academic specialists in a broad spectrum of the arts and humanities faculties, from history to economics, from literature to cultural and gender studies, to investigate with the help of a modern, scholarly editorship, including annotations and introductions, women’s construction of their place and identity in a colonial setting. This is a setting dominated by male prerogatives and male discourses set against what was generally perceived a hostile or at least alien, ‘other’ environment. These letters ‘written home’ are not only straightforward historical sources, but, more excitingly, representations of the state of the Empire in far-off lands sent home to the metropolitan centre in Britain and, very occasionally, in other cultural centres established as ‘home’. Apart from being open to the question of what women’s situations were like and how they themselves perceived the colonial context and society where they were living at the time, often against their own preferences, all of these letters can be read as specifically constructed and often highly selective impressions of what the authors wanted their addressees at home to accept as their colonial way of life and situation. The edition will pay close attention to the regional and local specificities of the very different colonial situations in different parts of the British Empire, from the settler colonies of North America to the isolated military and administrative outposts in Asia or the complex ethnic situation and economic involvement in South Africa. The attempt is made in this series to take into consideration these geographic variations, while at the same time offering samples from the broad historical spectrum of the colonial period, which is here roughly circumscribed by the dates of 1700 to 1920 as the era when British colonial activities were at their most active in various parts of the world. Many of the letters have never before been published General introduction provides background information on historical context, colonial situation, status of women’s writing at the time and gender relations Headnotes in the edition provide a brief outline of the status of the manusript and outline editorial principles and procedures in further specification for each individual volume beyond the general outline provided in the general editor’s preface to be printed at the beginning of each volume Endnotes explain archaic or unusual words, providing additional background information (geography, history etc.) and occasional notes on text (corrupt passages; illegible words etc.)