SOURCE: Hudson, Sara. Review of The Representation of Women in Fiction, edited by Carolyn Heilbrun and Margaret T. Higonnet. Southern Humanities Review 18, no. 2 (spring 1984): 185-88.

In the following excerpt, Hudson considers the utility and readability of the critical essays collected in The Representation of Women in Fiction.

The Representation of Women in Fiction is a collection of feminist criticism. In the first of a two-part Introduction, Carolyn Heilbrun celebrates the devotion of the 1981 meeting of the English Institute to a program on women in fiction which, she notes, marks a break in the traditional (marginal) role allotted to women on the past thirty-nine programs of the Institute. Three of the six essays in this collection were presented as Institute papers: “Fictional Consensus and Female Casualties,” by Elizabeth Ermarth; “The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: (Re)production, the Künstlerroman Tradition, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield,” by...