“Read and Write I don’t know. Other things I know.” So says Christophine, illiterate and savvy servant in Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’ brilliant addendum to Emily Bronte’s Jane Eyre. This iteration of the Women Writers course examines how the privileges and powers attached to literacy, self-construction, creativity and authorship, have historically been gendered and raced. We will trace the historical processes by which women within the British Empire gradually demanded and obtained access to those privileges and powers. In other words, this course takes a comparative approach to the question of how women became reading and writing subjects within imperialism. Texts include A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Mr. Meeson’s Will, and writings by Gayatri Spivak, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Rassundari Devi, Elizabeth Browning, Flora Annie Steel, and Susan Gubar.