Abena Busia (co-director)
The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740

Fifteenth Anniversary Edition
The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2003

The first of four volumes in the Women Writing Africa Project, this landmark collection presents two centuries of texts by African women and reveals a powerful cultural legacy. Ranging from communal songs and folk tales to letters, diaries, poems, fiction, interviews, court records, and other documents, the texts offer a vivid picture of African women's lives. Their work and families, their experiences of the cruelty of colonialism and war, and their struggles for civil rights are described in voices young and old, of diverse racial and ethnic identities. The volume includes Urieta Kazahendike, an early convert to Christianity, and Queen Regent Labotsibeni of Swaziland, as well as writers and activists such as Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Sindiwe Magona, and Winnie Mandela.

Poet and short story writer, Abena Busia is Project Co-Director of ‘Women Writing Africa’', and Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature.  She has been involved in producing groundbreaking and historic published collections of African and Indian women writers, rarely heard and never before gathered in one publication.