Women Writers and the Hero of Romance studies the nature of the hero and his meaning for the female seeker, or quester, in romance fiction from Wuthering Heights to Fifty Shades of Grey. The book includes chapters on Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Sheik, and the novels of Ayn Rand and Dorothy Dunnett.
"Always incomparable, Judith Wilt has never been better. This revisionist genre study not of heroes or heroines exactly, but of hero-worship in a certain strain of romance fiction, is learned, scrupulous, wide-ranging, witty, confident, and captivating, full of more ideas per chapter than in many whole books, inhabiting the novels at issue from the inside out with a tenacious charm of exposition that renders a potentially controversial argument as disarming as it is startling." Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA
"[A] provocative monograph.... engaging" M. E. Burstein, CHOICE
"[A] provocative monograph.... engaging" M. E. Burstein, CHOICE