Women Writing In India: edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita.

This collection contains writings of women from since various times, and often the writers are not professional - which is not new for India or indeed anywhere for that matter. In India there have been various poets who simply sang their verses as they did housework and other work, men and women, and often those verses became famous due to their popularity which in turn was due to their high worth, subsequent to which they got written and recorded. But this collection is not of those well known works, rather is about a good many works of very astoundingly good quality that lay about in corners after or without publication.

The couple of stories that stick in mind after all these years are one about a woman despised by her husband who wanted a posh wife, and later came to find her not only worthy but attractive - but he was now married to another woman (there was no divorce then, Hinduism has no divorce in tradition and the nation had not yet legalised such a provision for Hindus, but polygamy was still legal), and moreover, as he found to his surprise, his first wife (who was still a virgin albeit legally his wife) spurned him strongly out of not a mere revenge or anger but a self respect he found astounding, and moreover a sense of morality that she declared made it impossible to allow them to cohabit since he not only had declared he could not see her as his wife but also had married another woman, now her friend.

The other one is about a woman who learned to write long after she was married and had children, and she writes about her life, amongst the details of which one is about how she was simply unable to have any food for three days at one time due to various small details of household life, although she was cooking for the whole household of over a dozen people all this time.