This wide-ranging, historically rich account of women's fiction in the 1960s and 1970s relates changes in the social structure of Britain and the US to representations of women's experience. Maroula Joannou examines a time of innovation, hope, and change in the history of literature and thehistory of women. She analyzes the literary impact of the women's movements and civil rights in Britain and the civil rights movement in the US on Angela Carter's modern fairy tales and Ursula Le Guin's science fiction. Topics include femininity, sexuality, working-class women's writing, motherhood,continuities and change in the literary tradition, the feminist confessional novel, experiments in science and detective fiction, narratives about the end of the British Empire, and black women's writing in the US.