The Annotated Arabian Nights will be the first English translation by a woman, and will include female protagonists that have previously been omitted.

American writer Sandra Newman’s novel Julia will tell the dystopian story from the perspective of Winston Smith’s lover.

The Philosopher Queens highlights thinkers from Hypatia to Hannah Arendt who the authors say are missing in most accounts of the subject.

After extensive research, reference publisher is quietly replacing examples that ‘unnecessarily perpetuate stereotypes’ – while also reflecting how language is used.

The first female English authors were thought to have begun writing in the later middle ages, but a new book claims the tradition dates back to the eighth century.

The chair of judges and Oxford professor Nigel Shadbolt said the book had made him, as an AI researcher and data scientist, look at his field afresh.

The petition points out that Oxford dictionaries contain words such as “bitch, besom, piece, bit, mare, baggage, wench, petticoat, frail, bird, bint, biddy, filly” as synonyms for woman.

When the Sunday Times picked its 100 favourite crime and spy novels published since 1945 last weekend, only 28 were by women. In response, Ann Cleeves, Val McDermid and Dreda Say Mitchell and other leading writers nominated some alternatives.

As part of a project that aims to highlight hidden sexist content, Associació Espai i Lleure reviewed the characters in hundreds of children's books, whether or not they speak and what roles they perform. The group found that 30% of the books were highly sexist, had strong stereotypes and were, in its opinion, of no pedagogical value.

Marion Turner’s book is the first full biography of Chaucer for a generation, and the first written by a woman. “There’s been a long tradition of almost toxically masculine biographies. I would not say that is true of all biographies, and not of more recent ones, but there are lots which have really focused on a chummy masculine response to Chaucer,” the academic said.

References to women writers’ ages were “ubiquitous”, even in reviews, the researchers found, with women twice as likely to have their age referenced as part of their coverage.

Founded in 1975 during the second wave of the women’s liberation movement, the archive brings together an extensive collection of feminist literature and “herstories” and is one of only three such facilities in the UK.