SOURCE: “New People in the Old Museum of New Orleans: Ellen Gilchrist, Sheila Bosworth, and Nancy Lemann,” in Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography, edited by Dorothy H. Brown and Barbara C. Ewell, Louisiana State University Press, 1992, pp. 195-210.

In the following essay, Woodland discusses how the literary tradition of New Orleans is changed and how New Orleans' society is portrayed in the fiction of Ellen Gilchrist, Sheila Bosworth, and Nancy Lemann.

Experiences, reminiscences, episodes, picked up as only women know how to pick them up from other women’s lives,—or other women’s destinies, as they prefer to call them,—and told as only women know how to relate them; … that is what interests the women who sit of summer nights on balconies. For in those long-moon countries life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be furnished real and gratis, in...