SOURCE: Paulin, Tom. “Fugitive Spirits.” New Statesman 96, no. 2470 (21 July 1978): 94.

In the following excerpt, Paulin offers a negative assessment of A Literature of Their Own, arguing that the work makes a “snobbish mockery of Women's Liberation.”

Those Victorian photographs of bearded patriarchs flanked by their unsmiling families may seem merely quaint to us nowadays, but it's important to remember how they were once the agents of hideously formidable cultural tyranny. As Gloria Fromm shows in her long, loving biography of Dorothy Richardson, the effort to escape the domination of ‘masculine culture’ involved an intense struggle against a series of possessive father-figures. Dorothy Richardson's father was a cultivated, eventually bankrupt despot who made her mother feel both damned and stupid, and finally drove her to commit suicide. Stricken by guilt, Dorothy left home to become a dentist's receptionist in London. She wrote reviews, attended Fabian meetings and had an affair...