SOURCE: Toth, Emily. “Questioning the Quest.” Women's Review of Books 6, no. 5 (February 1989): 11.

In the following excerpt, Toth praises the eloquence, honesty, and wit of the essays in Writing a Woman's Life.

And certain motives are still not seen as appropriate for women, Carolyn Heilbrun points out brilliantly in Writing a Woman's Life. The romance and marriage plot is still the accepted narrative for a woman's story; the quest narrative of ambition—like Lorin Jones' singleminded concentration on her art—is much harder to shape when the life at the center is a woman's. Polly's first impulse, once she learns that Lorin Jones didn't care about anything except her painting, is to portray her as spiteful, sly and selfish—the usual condemnations for a woman who puts her own dreams first.

Let's look at it another way, says Heilbrun in these eloquent essays. Why do women who are public...