This is a unique collection of writings by and about women of six different centuries. "When women wrote," says Joan Goulianos, "they touched upon experiences rarely touched upon by men, they spoke in different ways about these experiences, they often wrote in different forms." Margery Kempe, a fourteenth-century wife and mother, described her struggles as a religious mystic. Aphra Behn, a seventeenth-century author and spy, wrote about passion. Mary Shelley, in the nineteenth-century, evoked the loneliness of widowhood. Anais Nin, in the twentieth, plumbed the confusions and pleasures of the modern woman. It is to talented and courageous writers like these that we owe the works in 'by a Woman writt', works "in which women wrote about their lives and from which woman and men today can draw insight about theirs."