A Jury Of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx

This is a really informative book but wearing its scholarship lightly. It provides a historical overview from the eighteenth century up until modern times and covers poetry, prose and drama. It reads well and provides biographical details as well as evaluations of the texts themselves and the themes that interested these women. Feminists do have to grid their teeth at some of the situations but then, that is the way it was. Best we can do now is know about the situations. For anyone who wants to know about American women's writing, this book is a joy. It fits well with the short story anthology "Scribbling Women"- Hawthorne's polite, respectful description - some real gems in there and a story called "A Jury of her Peers".

This mighty book is an assessment of the entirety of American women's literature from1650 to 2000. It covers poetry, drama and fiction, and tucks in a lot of politics and social history on the way. There's no doubting Showalter's incredibly impressive research skills, nor her wide ambition, and there is definitely a lot of interest here. One can't help but admire the sheer scope of the piece, and it does direct the reader to various interesting authors. At the same time, I felt the volume had some considerable problems.Chief among these is that it simply tries to do too much. A book that covers more than 300 years of women's literature in America, and doesn't limit itself to any one genre (a book on 'the novel' in America during this period might have been an easier read) will naturally have little space for individual authors, and have to tackle each different period quite fast. I found that there was just too much to take in, particularly in the earlier stretches, which dealt with authors that I didn't know, and that a lot of interesting writers didn't receive that much coverage.The other problem was that Showalter was for long periods not very selective in the writers she included. This is a book that very much views literature in terms of social history, sometimes in quite narrow terms - in the 1950s women were 'oppressed', in the 1970s they were 'liberated', in the 1980s fiction became 'political and multicultural' etc etc - and I often felt writers were included because they happened to illustrate a sociological point that Showalter was making, rather than because of literary merit. At times, there was little sense of whether certain authors were better writers than others and why - other than social context - it's worth reading their books, little differentiation in the end between, say, 'Gone with the Wind' and the equivalent novels by more 'literary' authors like Caroline Gordon, while 'Forever Amber' is given more space than the work of more serious literary authors. At times, this lack of differentiation can be a bit misleading - I bought Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's 'Dirty Girls' Social Club' assuming it was serious literary fiction as she was one of few Latin American authors discussed, and was rather disappointed when it turned out to be bog-standard chick lit. I also wasn't sure about some of Showalter's claims - do we really know that Julia Ward Howe would have been as good a poet as Emily Dickinson if only she'd had a better home life?I also was uncertain by the end who the book was intended to be for. If it's for academics and literary students, it certainly gives a good 'whistle-stop tour' of American women's literature from its beginnings to around 2000 (though the later stages are quite skimpy, of which more later). But does it give enough detail about any period - any more than such readers might get from, say, Lorna Sage's brilliant 'Cambridge Companion to Women's Literature in English' - for this sort of readership? And for the general reader I came to feel that the range of references was just too wide - I ended up skipping a lot of the early bits just because the authors' names meant nothing to me, but also wishing that there'd been more, and more measured discourse, on some of the 'true greats' such as Willa Cather. Also, as Showalter is so constrained by her decision to write in terms of sociological history, a lot of women writers' stories either fizzle out or come in fits and starts - Joyce Carol Oates, for example, is mentioned briefly in 'the 1970s', 'the 1980s', 'the 1990s' etc. It sometimes makes it hard to follow the path of any one particular writer.I also, I have to confess, found the book a little opinionated - I had this problem too with Showalter's book on feminism, where she seemed to imply both that Princess Diana was a great feminist icon (questionable) and that she herself was one of few feminists who'd 'got it right'. Showalter certainly has her favourite authors - often the ones that work best in her tendency to put books in a sociological context - and seems oddly oblivious to the qualities of others. So, Sylvia Plath, for example, appears beyond reproach, as does Susan Sontag - Plath's ruthless egoism and the uneven quality of her work (at best, brilliant, at worst, self-pitying and repetitive) are ignored, as is Sontag's rather dry, lecturing style, not great for fiction! Her lionizing of certain writers - without having the space to tell us why - can be annoying. So can her tendency to sum up something about an author's work in a brisk sentence or too, as if what she believes is simply fact - in fact, I am far from sure that 'Paul's Case' is Willa Cather's best story, or the best example of her work, or that Cather made the right decision cutting 'The Song of the Lark' so much, to take one example. And she can also be perhaps too critical of other authors - Katherine Ann Porter, for one. I also found there was too much quoting of other literary critics to sum up an author's work - it made it seem as though Showalter was desperate to show her readers how much research she'd done, and made the text a bit leaden.I also felt that the final section ran out of steam - less and less writers were examined in detail, and I felt there were some omissions to the 1990s section. Why, for example, do a long section on Annie Proulx and Jane Smiley but barely mention Mary Gordon, Claire Messud or Francine Prose? Why do Ann Patchett and Alice Hoffman get little or even no references, while earlier popular women writers of much lower quality do? Why doesn't Barbara Kingsolver get mentioned alongside Louise Erdrich? I don't think 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt crops up, though that was a very important book for the 1990s. On the other had, I felt that some of the authors she did spend quite a bit of time on - Gish Jen, for example - weren't perhaps quite as interesting as she made out.I did enjoy parts of this book very much, and it's certainly taught me a bit more about American women's literature. But in the end I agree with the TLS review which, though praising the book, described it as something of a list. I came away feeling that Showalter had been massively over-ambitious, and could have produced a much more interesting book if she'd limited herself to a couple of centuries of women novelists, or women poets, or women dramatists, rather than trying to cover so much so fast. In the end, other than a lot of names, I didn't feel I got all that much more from this book than I would have done from a really good dictionary or companion to women's writing.three and a half stars.

I must say I was somewhat disappointed by Showalter's book. I expected more from her, actually I expected a history of women's fiction. What I found was rather a survey, the history did not quite coagulate. The commentary on individual writers was superficial, the level was that of a review, not something you could actually use in class. This is the second time I teach a course on women's 20th century fiction and I had hoped to use this as a textbook. No such luck. It's pleasant reading, but the kind you can safely take on holiday.