Friday, March 13, 2009

Women writers

I just have to share this fabulous review by Katha Pollitt on Elaine Showalter's new book A Jury of Her Peers. It's more than a review of a really good book (that you should add to your Amazon wish list, as I just did). It's a commentary on the historical constraints on women writers and the way these constraints affect contemporary authors.

She asks these questions:
"More different than the books themselves is the gendered framing of how we read them. Nobody says Henry James is a less ambitious writer because he wrote The Portrait of a Lady and not The Portrait of a Sea Captain. If The Corrections had been written by Janet Franzen, would it have been seen not as a bid for the Great American Novel trophy, but as a very good domestic novel with some futuristic flourishes that didn't quite come off?"

It will make you think next time you browse the library shelves...

2 comments:

tv said...

Thanks for the link. I immediately ordered the book. *blushes, because she has a hard time not ordering books*

Before I even admitted to myself that I was a feminist (or acquired the vocabulary or the courage to do so in my evangelical circles...), I wrote a column in my high school newspaper decrying the fact that, for the most part, the boys in school had no interest reading books by women. Musing that perhaps I'd have to write as "V.J. Mullen." Interesting that my 18-year-old self was asking such questions.

Reference Services said...

Your web site is outstanding!

Here is the url of the blog from the Archives of the Sandusky Library, if you
would like to take a look:

http://sanduskyhistory.blogspot.com