Annis Pratt

The Marshlanders is about the conflict between self-sustaining communities and their enemies, who are determined to drain their wetlands for agricultural development. Clare and William are adopted by marsh dwellers and coastal farmers after William’s father, a pharmacist, has been murdered and Clare has barely escaped with her life from a public shaming of her mother. Their communities are threatened by a cabal of merchants, ministers, and apothecaries. The merchants are buying up their common land, the ministers insist they renounce their love of the earth and of their own bodies, and the apothecaries, greedy to corner the market in herbs, persecute their traditional healers. The Marshlanders are joyously sensual, seek harmony with their watery landscape, and are creatively practical, always looking for new ideas about farming, irrigation, navigating, foraging, and weaving. Their enemies are sexually violent and seek to dominate nature. They pursue technology out of greed and govern by male domination and military force. This novel has a fast paced plot and is a compelling read.

Volume One of The Marshlanders Trilogy

The Marshlanders

Barbara White

Mary Wyer

Andrea Loewenstein

Archetypal patterns endure because they give expression to perennial dilemmas submerged in the collective unconscious. Having examined more than 300 novels by both major and minor women writers over three centuries, Annis Pratt perceives in women's fiction distinctive elements of plot, characterization, image, and tone. She argues that women's fiction should be read as a mutually illuminative or interrelated field of texts reflecting feminine archetypes that are signals of a repressed tradition in conflict with patriarchal culture. Pratt suggests that the archetypal patterns in women's fiction provide a ritual expression containing the potential for the reader's personal transformation and that women's novels constitute literary variations on preliterary folk practices that are available in the realm of imagination even when they have long been absent from day-to-day life.

Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction

Henry J. Pratt

Faith Pratt Hopp

Ronald Brown

Annotation The first book to examine the relationship between church organizations and urban politics.

Annis Pratt

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