SOURCE: Lyons, Brenda Foglio. “American Patchwork.” Essays in Criticism 42, no. 4 (October 1992): 338-44.

In the following review, Lyons argues that Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing is an inconsistent and incomplete, though entertaining, literary history of American women's writing.

The notion of being simultaneously inside and outside patriarchy and its institutional processes is a feminist ideological construct that has achieved the status of mainstream cliché. Titles by French writers have surfaced which name this borderline as a discursive subject: Inside by Hélène Cixous, which won the Prix Medicis in 1969, is a fictive elaboration of l'écriture feminine; Outside: Selected Writings (1984) by Marguerite Duras, released in an English translation by Carol Barko in 1986, is a diverse collection of short pieces that comment on social and political injustices. Elaine Showalter's book, Sister's Choice, asks questions that concern boundary disputes on a remapped topography of English studies...