Welcome to WomenWriters

This database contains information on the production of women authors from the middle ages up to c. 1900, and on the reception of their works by contemporaries as well as early literary historians (both men and women). Are concerned: women active as authors in European countries and their (former) colonies. Thus the database allows the study of these women’s writing in their international context, and the place to be attributed to them in transnational historiography.

The database is one of the first products of the research project Women Writers and their audiences (1997-2004), financed by NWO (Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research). It was placed on the Internet in April 2001, was granted the “International Innovation Award 2005” on the occasion of the XVIth International Conference of the Association for History and Computing (Amsterdam), and has formed/forms the basis of a series of digitization, research and networking projects (www.womenwriters.nl). They were/are carried out, under the direction of Suzan van Dijk, at the University of Utrecht’s Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC) and the Huygens ING of the KNAW (Royal Academy of Sciences) in The Hague. [Read more]