SOURCE: Landy, Marcia. Review of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, by Elaine Showalter. Modern Fiction Studies 23, no. 4 (winter 1977-1978): 637-45.

In the following excerpt, Landy praises Showalter's broad historical analysis of female authors in A Literature of Their Own, but criticizes her tendency to offer unsympathetic, overly negative judgments of individual writers.

Two of the four books reviewed here are distinguished by new and challenging critical methodologies, and two are not. Gabriel Josipovici's edited collection of essays on the modern novel reveals a primarily structuralist and linguistic orientation and Elaine Showalter's work, A Literature of Their Own, presents an exploration in feminist criticism. The third book, Lisa Ruddick's essay, is a reading of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and the fourth, Ronald Hayman's British Council pamphlet, while raising some critical issues, makes little pretense to critical analysis. The latter is restricted to...