"The word 'rape' today denotes sexual appropriation; yet it originally signified the theft of a woman from her father or husband by abduction or elopement. In the early modern period, its meaning is in transition between these two senses, while rapes and attempted rapes proliferate in literature. This age also sees the emergence of the woman writer, despite a sexual ideology which equates women's writing with promiscuity.

Classical myths, however, associate women's story-telling with resistance to rape."--BOOK JACKET. "Jocelyn Catty draws on a wide range of texts from fiction, poetry and drama, by male and female writers, canonical and non-canonical, to reveal the significance of rape in the portrayal of gender relations."--BOOK JACKET.