In the introduction to the revised edition of A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter explains that when she was pursuing her doctorate, few sources focused exclusively on women's literature, much less on the British novelists of the Victorian era. While scholars and critics concentrated on significant writers like Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, Showalter noticed many gaps in the picture. Women writers were under-represented and not well-understood.

A Literature of Their Own is Showalter's attempt to fill in some of the gaps and to strive toward a better understanding of the development of women's literature. She explains that, by necessity, she has chosen to limit her study to professional female novelists in Britain beginning in the 1840s. These were the women who chose writing as a career, and they were the ones who set the direction for women's writing during that time.

Showalter constructs the majority of her description of women's writing around three phases or stages: the Feminine, the Feminist, and the Female. For each one, the author presents its primary characteristics and a representative writer or two who exemplify them.

The Feminine stage lasted from the 1840s to George Eliot's death in 1880. Women novelists in this era were typically less educated than their male counterparts, even though many came from "the upper middle class, the aristocracy, and the professions." These women struggled to balance their desire to write with the lack of encouragement they received from their families and mentors. Some women started writing out of financial necessity when their situations took a turn for the worse. Many of them still felt guilt and viewed their writing as selfish.

The women of this era also faced a double standard. Because they were women, critics did not expect much of them stereotypically. Women were not supposed to write better than men. They had different training or experiences. Yet, individually, women writers wanted desperately to prove themselves. In the process, they tended to "cultivate their feelings and overvalue romance."

The author then turns her attention to the Feminine phase's heroes. These "women's men" are usually "impossibly pious and desexed, or impossibly idle and oversexed." They are all projections of women's insecurities and desires. The first group is plunged into female roles and experiences. The second group are brutes. There is also a third group of clergymen who fell somewhere in the middle and were considered "safe" male characters for women. Women authors often lowered their male characters through "blinding, maiming, or blighting" to bring them down into female emotions and limitations.

Before moving into her discussion of the Feminist era, Showalter presents a transitional period with the sensationalist novels of the 1860s and 1870s. These books addressed female misery; in them, women writers "recorded their disillusion, their frustration, their anger, indeed their murderous feelings." Still, they needed help to solve the conflicts they raised.

The Feminist era, according to Showalter, promoted the "New Women" who wanted to change society and reduce the oppression of women by "the male sex drive" and by the anti-female prejudice of the government. The Feminist authors concentrated on "motherhood and maternal" love but also identified with the most exploited women, like prostitutes. 

Showalter chooses Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand as her examples of Feminist work. Both women exhibit the "claustrophobic" sense of this era.

Showalter devotes a chapter to the suffrage movement and its effects on women's writers. Some female authors, like Elizabeth Robins, worked as suffragettes for political advancement toward equality. Others, like Mrs. Humphry Ward, opposed it as a selfish turning away from the real needs of women.