SOURCE: "Challenging the Language," in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Vol. 2, No. 6, July-August, 1987, pp. 11, 14.

In the following excerpt, Libertin provides a favorable review of The Newly Born Woman.

Those who are unfamiliar with Hélène Cixous's "Laugh of the Medusa" or with the excerpts from "Sorties" in Signs or in Marks and de Courtivron's New French Feminisms will want to read her complete essay, in addition to Catherine Clément's essay, "The Guilty One," along with their concluding dialogue, "Exchange," in the translation of this 1975 feminist classic, La Jeune Née (The Newly Born Woman). This book contains an exceptional introductory essay, "Tarantella of Theory," by Sandra Gilbert, which prepares the Anglo-American reader for this radical text by stunning us with the depth of rage and desire in writers from Dickinson to Rich and by fending off objections to possible charges of essentialism and...