THE INNER WORLD OF THE WOMEN NOVELISTS The emergence of feminist literary criticism is one of the major developments in literary studies in the past thirty years or so. Since feminist literary criticism has re-discovered the forgotten texts, from the 17th century onwards, written by women whose contribution to the emergence of the novel genre is undeniable. It is quite important to present them both in a historical and literary perspective. To understand the nature of feminist literary criticism and its alternative approach to literature, we must first understand its long history. Although critics like Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Elleman and Kate Millett were among the first to reveal the literary history of women's images and to discuss the dominant stereotyped images of female fictional characters, the history of feminist criticism goes back hundreds of years in time. It can even be traced back to Aristotle's declaration that "The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities ," and St. Thomas Aquinas's belief that woman is an "imperfect man ." Texts going back as far as Aristophanes's comedy Lysistrata, "which is about how women achieved social change by withholding sexual favours from their men " (Ruthven 16); and Aeschylus's trilogy, The Oresteia, where Athena wins over Apollo's argument that the mother is no parent to her child, are among the earliest examples of feminist criticism. Also, Raman Selden mentions John Donne's "Air and Angels" where Donne al-ludes to Aquinas's theory that form is masculine and matter feminine: "the superior, godlike, male intellect impresses its form upon the malleable, inert, female matter". Sharon Spencer mentions Sappho of the 6th century BC as the greatest lyric poet of antiquity" and Christine de Pisan's work as the "first major work of feminist criticism". Born in 1364 Pisan attracts our attention because she "criticised the description of woman's nature drawn by Jean de Meun in Roman de La Rose". Pisan's Epistre au dieu d'amours (1399) was written against the biased representations of women in de Meun's work. In her La cite des Dames (1405), Pisan also argued that God created man and woman as equal beings. But, it is Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindicaton of the Rights of woman (1792) which marks the first modem awareness of women's struggle for equal rights, and therefore it is the first milestone for the equality of the sexes. Wollstonecraft was influenced by the ideas of the French revolution concerning the equal rights of individuals. K.K. Ruthven observes that "the analogy with slavery, which is present in Wollstonecraft's book, "becomes the dominant trope in nineteenth-century feminist writing, doubtless because of feminist involvement in the abolitionist movement". Seventy seven years later, in The Subjection of Women (1869), John Stuart Mill expressed it very powerfully: "All men, except the most brutish, desire to have in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds" (Norton Anthology Vol.2, 991). Sixty years later Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) developed and enhanced these views with a strong female sensibility and criticism. A Room of One’s Own became an important precursor of feminist literary criticism. Here, Virginia Woolf argues that the male dominated ideas of the patriarchal society prevented women from realising their creativity and true potential: In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century... Such material difficulties were formidable; but much worse were the immaterial. The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case not indifference but hostility. As Virginia Woolf was especially emphasising, women writers had to work against the grain in order to write. Yet writing was the only way left to women to assert individuality and autonomy. Excluded from 1