The Posthumous Voice in Women's Writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath

This provocative book posits a new theory by which women's writing forefronts and hides the author's implied body within and behind the written work, ironizing the commonplace of the feminine body as a dead body. Raymond traces the use of the disembodied posthumous voice in works by Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, and contends that the elegy written in the voice of a dead speaker for herself articulates a crucial site of the woman writer's interaction with canonicity.