Critical Essay | Critical Review by Helen Carr

Critical Review by Helen Carr

SOURCE: Carr, Helen. “Patchwork Quilt.” New Statesman and Society 4, no. 170 (27 September 1991): 54.

In the following review, Carr compliments Showalter's research and analysis in Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing, but faults Showalter's romanticized notion of female community and virtue.

Sister's Choice is, so to speak, the American sister of Elaine Showalter's first book, A Literature of Their Own, which traced a distinctive literary tradition through British women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her argument then was that women formed a subculture, and their writing had to be interpreted like that of other literary subcultures. It was not the story of the classics alone: the rediscovery of forgotten and disparaged female writing was an essential part of drawing the historical line.

A Literature of Their Own was a landmark of feminist criticism. Yet, as Showalter says at the beginning of Sister's Choice,...
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