The Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of Adrienne Rich's most renowned essays, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision. Her thoughts on feminism, poetry, race, homosexuality and identity are still powerful and relevant today. Discussing everything from her fearless poetic vision to her revolutionary views on social justice, Rich's essays unite the political, personal and poetical.

Included are Rich's landmark essays "Motherhood as Experience and Institution"; "What Is Found There"; "Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts" and "Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence". As Sandra Gilbert writes, "To re-read and to re-think Rich's prose as a complete oeuvre is to encounter a major public intellectual..."