SOURCE: Hughes, Kathryn. “Holding the Middle Ground.” New Statesman 130, no. 4542 (18 June 2001): 52-3.

In the following review of Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage, Hughes praises Showalter's accessible writing style, but criticizes her methodology and diluted analysis.

When Elaine Showalter published A Literature of Their Own in 1977, it was a revelation and a celebration all in one. In her characteristically fluent prose, she suggested that British women's writing in the 19th and 20th centuries (her bookends were the Brontës and Doris Lessing) had been systematically sidelined, obscured and trivialised. Now here was Showalter, an American academic at the forefront of the new wave of “women's studies”, showing us not only why those muffled voices mattered, but how they connected to one another to create, if not exactly a lineage, certainly a web of influence and sympathy.

It was perhaps inevitable that Showalter's work would lose some of...