SOURCE: Lee, Hermione. “Separate Spheres and Common Threads.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4624 (15 November 1991): 8.

In the following review, Lee offers a negative assessment of Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing.

This is a friendly title, [Sister's Choice,] and it comes in a positive red colour, with a bold quilt-pattern design, because “Sister's Choice” is the name of the quilt made by Celie and Shug in The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and the quilt is an emblem, Elaine Showalter says, of “a universalist, interracial, and intertextual tradition”. In deliberately selecting a title from a non-literary and non-white context, Showalter makes her main point: that American women's writing does not, or “must” no longer, belong to a “separate sphere”, but belongs, or “must” belong, to a common, pluralistic heritage of races, genders and cultures. These are rousing sentiments, and this short book (based on her Clarendon Lectures...