Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on early responses to M. Milton’s writing by English women authors. It presents an intriguing transposition of elements from Milton’s biography and his epic, Paradise Lost, this time into a modern-day tropical paradise, Copacabana. The book offers a personal perspective on being a woman reader of Milton’s epic poem. It argues that feminist revisions of C. Jung’s gender theories by Susan Rowland and other theorists can be helpfully applied to the first marriage. In the seventies and eighties, feminist scholars critiquing Milton brought attention to the role of the woman reader, exploring the ways in which many women readers have experiences in reading Paradise Lost that differ significantly from those of men. The book discusses fascination of male artists and female novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the genesis of Paradise Lost within a household full of women.