Protection for Women

Jane Anger is credited with being the first feminist writer in the English language. Her pamphlet Protection for Women provides insight into the relationship between the sexes, regarded, for the first time, solely from a woman’s perspective. Anger’s text refutes the content of a now lost pamphlet Book his Surfeit in Love which outlines the complaints against women of ‘a surfeiting lover’, rendered in this modern edition as an ‘over-indulging lover’ who has ‘gorged on sex’. This volume presents the first translation of Anger’s pamphlet into modern English together with exhaustive explanatory notes. For the first time, Jane Anger’s witty and wily advice to women is easily accessible to a modern reader. This edition also includes Jane Anger’s original text for anyone interested in experiencing the unique ‘music’ of the 16th-century English.