Urszula Chowaniec is a researcher at the Department of Russian Language and Culture, University of Tampere, Finland. She also researches and teaches at the Jagiellonian University and the Akademia Pedagogiczna in Krakow, Poland. She gained her PhD in literary studies at the Jagiellonian University in 2004 and is the author of In Search of Woman: On the Early Novels of Irena Krzywicka (W poszukiwaniu kobiety. O wczesnych powiesciach Ireny Krzywickiej, 2007). She has published on women’s writing, literary theory and literary history. Ursula Phillips is Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Her PhD thesis was on religion and feminism in Narcyza Zmichowska. She is a contributor to and co-editor of Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context: Ten Essays on Polish Prose (2005) and co-author of Polish Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Pisarki polskie od sredniowiecza do wspolczesnosci, 2000). Marja Rytkonen is a researcher at the University of Tampere, Department of Russian Language and Culture. Her PhD dissertation analysed Russian women’s autobiographical texts of the 1990s. She is a contributor to and joint editor of Real Stories, Imagined Realities: Fictionality and Non-fictionality in Literary Constructs and Historical Contexts (2007).