SOURCE: Baym, Nina. Review of Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing, by Elaine Showalter. American Literature 64, no. 3 (spring 1992): 629-30.

In the following review, Baym compliments the structure and subject material of Sister's Choice.

From its dust jacket illustration of a quilt block to a final chapter on quilting, this book takes “piecing”—women's creation of patterned art from snips of available fabric—as the metaphor for American women's writing. The book itself is artfully pieced, inserting four previously published essays between two each of four Clarendon Lectures delivered in 1989. This elegant congruence of content and form forestalls (though it cannot entirely eliminate) concern about completeness; the book presents itself not as master narrative but as scrap-bag assemblage. The first chapter uses postcolonialist theory to deny the aptness of master narratives for histories of muted or minority discourses; piecing becomes, implicitly, the most responsible way to...