Description: Through close scrutiny of literary collaborations in which women writers have played central roles, Women Coauthors shows how partnerships in writing -- between two women or between a woman and a man -- provide a paradigm of literary creativity that complicates traditional views of both author and text and makes us revise old habits of thinking about writing.

Focusing on the social dynamics of literary production, including the conversations that precede and surround collaborative writing, Women Coauthors treats its coauthored texts as both representations and acts of collaboration. Among the many partnerships discussed are black-white collaborations, such as that of the Delany Sisters and Amy Hill Hearth on Having Our Say; lesbian couples whose lives and writings were intertwined, including Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper ("Michael Field") and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; and the Native American wife-and-husband authors Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.

Framed in time by the feminist and abolitionist movements of the late nineteenth century and the ongoing social struggles surrounding gender, race, and sexuality in the late twentieth century, the partnerships and texts observed in Women Coauthors explore collaboration as a path toward equity, both socioliterary and erotic.

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