Elizabeth Abel (born 1945[1]) is an American literary scholar who, as of 2024, holds the John F. Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
[3] Abel gives her research areas (as of 2024) as "gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, and twentieth-century fiction" particularly Virginia Woolf, and "race, cultural studies, and visuality".
According to Kathryn West in Abel's entry in the Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory, the essays marked a shift in feminist literary theory from "recovering a lost tradition to discovering the terms of confrontation with the dominant tradition", by means of "specific historical studies of the ways women revise prevailing themes and styles".
[4][5] According to the academic Lisa Ruddick, Abel shows that Woolf "absorbed many of Freud's insights" on gender identity, but simultaneously "inflected them in a manner that we would now call feminist".
[6] Ulrich Adelt describes the book as the "first comprehensive study" of the subject but writes that it "occasionally borders on over-interpretation" of the images analyzed.