Writing missing links: Rewriting women's history through literature

Throughout history, women's achievements and struggles often went unnoticed and underrepresented by literature and historiography. "Writing Missing Links: Rewriting Women's History through Literature" discusses ways in which contemporary women novelists revise and rewrite histories by providing counter-narratives to established mainstream historical and political discourses. These creative projects of dismantling and questioning history, truth, and objectivity unearth women's history occluded by patriarchal Master Narratives. Three historical novels that redefine literature and history from a woman-centred perspective frame this thesis: Alias Grace (1996) by Margaret Atwood, My Dream of You (2001) by Nuala O'Faolain, and The Sealed Letter (2008) by Emma Donoghue. My theoretical approach focuses on the feminist concept of narrative voice that asserts a woman-centered point of view, as well as feminist criticism's relationship to other critical discourses such as postmodernism, historiography, (post-)colonialism, and neo-Victorian studies.