Elaine Showalter Critical Essay | Critical Review by Daniel J. Cahill

Critical Review by Daniel J. Cahill

SOURCE: Cahill, Daniel J. Review of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, by Elaine Showalter. World Literature Today 52, no. 1 (winter 1978): 114-15.

In the following review, Cahill praises the range and the scope of material in A Literature of Their Own, noting that the work “change the content and perspective of literary history as it is currently taught in our colleges and universities.”

The truly significant accomplishment of A Literature of Their Own is the creation of a new perceptual framework, an accurate and systematic literary history for women writers in the British tradition. In the most comprehensive and convincing study to date, Showalter has extended a radically new awareness of the evolution of a female literary tradition. In 1869 John Stuart Mill argued that if women lived in a different country from men and had never read any of their writings,...
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