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Summary
Summary
A Jury of Her Peers is an unprecedented literary landmark: the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000. In a narrative of immense scope and fascination, brimming with Elaine Showalter's characteristic wit and incisive opinions, we are introduced to more than 250 female writers. These include not only famous and expected names (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, Gwendolyn Brooks, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, and Jodi Picoult among them), but also many who were once successful and acclaimed yet now are little known, from the early American best-selling novelist Catherine Sedgwick to the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Susan Glaspell. Showalter shows how these writers both the enduring stars and the ones left behind by the canon were connected to one another and to their times. She believes it is high time to fully integrate the contributions of women into our American literary heritage, and she undertakes the task with brilliance and flair, making the case for the unfairly overlooked and putting the overrated firmly in their place. Whether or not readers agree with the book's roster of writers, A Jury of Her Peers is an irresistible invitation to join the debate, to discover long-lost great writers, and to return to familiar titles with a deeper appreciation. Itis a monumental work that will greatly enrich our understanding of American literary history and culture.
Author Notes
In 1977, Showalter published A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. It was one of the most influential works in feminist criticism, as it sought to establish a distinctive tradition for women writers. In later essays, Showalter helped to develop a clearly articulated feminist theory with two major branches: the special study of works by women and the study of all literature from a feminist perspective. In all of her recent writing, Showalter has sought to illuminate a "cultural model of female writing," distinguishable from male models and theories. Her role as editor bringing together key contemporary feminist criticism has been extremely influential on modern literary study. (Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
By covering the lives and careers of hundreds of American women writers of all backgrounds, this survey is ambitious and galvanizing, contributing to feminist theory without itself reading like theory. Diverse beyond easy description, these women, especially in earlier centuries, have two things in common. One is an almost universal break with patriarchal constructs. Second is gaining independence from European literary models, female as well as male. Although there have been multivolume, encyclopedic works of greater scope, like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Norton Anthology of Literature by Woman, this is the first guide and history ever attempted by one scholar working solo. With a generally chronological approach (including a handful of sensible deviations), Showalter's Baedeker showcases the rise and fall of styles and genres. Lives and careers of superstars such as Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Pearl S. Buck and Toni Morrison are put into high relief. In Showalter's book, the voices of several hundred other authors, ranging from Phillis Wheatley and Julia Ward Howe to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Grace Metalious and James Tiptree Jr., sing out in a monumental choral orchestrated by Showalter (A Literature of Their Own), a groundbreaking feminist scholar at Princeton. (Feb. 25) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
At lasta New World companion volume to the distinguished feminist scholar's pioneering A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront" to Lessing (1977). Showalter (Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, 2005, etc.) begins in the 17th century, spotlighting Anne Bradstreet's poems and Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative as American literature's founding documents. Poetry gets a great deal of attention, from 18th-century African-American Phillis Wheatley through Emily Dickinson to Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, mad housewives who trashed domesticity and challenged male poetic hegemony in the 1950s and '60s. Especially in her coverage of the 19th century, the author casts a wide net and considers the commercially successful novelists denigrated by Nathaniel Hawthorne as "a dd mob of scribbling women." She makes no exaggerated artistic claims for Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Maria Susanna Cummins and their ilk, but the author cogently elucidates how their popular fiction created an environment in which Harriet Beecher Stowe could write Uncle Tom's Cabin, the first Great American Novel by a woman. Home, husbands and housework were staple subjects, and sources of conflict, but not until the 1890s did New Women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin scandalize critics with frank depictions of female sexuality. As the authors become better known, Showalter's work necessarily becomes less groundbreaking. It remains intelligent and thorough, however, as she moves from Edith Wharton and Willa Cather at the beginning of the 20th century through the fraught relations between modernism and feminism in the '20s, women writers both liberated and constrained by political radicalism in the '30s and the repressive postwar cult of femininity that provoked the feminist explosion of the '60s and '70s (as well as such prominent naysayers as Joan Didion and Cynthia Ozick). Chapters on the '80s and '90s survey a more diverse, self-confident literature in which Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Jane Smiley, Annie Proulx and others write matter-of-factly as women without feeling limited in any way as to subject matter or style. Certain to make its way onto college course lists, Showalter's lucid, comprehensive survey should also find an appreciative audience of serious general readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In spite of concerted efforts to reclaim lost and neglected works by women writers, we have failed to fully grasp the complexity and richness of women's writing in America or the degree to which women have shaped American literature. Eminent scholar-critic Showalter is rueful about writing the first literary history of American women writers. How is it possible that this has never been undertaken before? The answer is part of the eye-opening story Showalter tells in this vigorously investigated consideration of the lives and work of professional American women writers. Masterfully blending succinct biographies with incisive history and peppery literary criticism, she links the evolution of women's creative writing to steady changes in women's social status. Showalter's analysis of such salient writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath is fresh and revelatory, while her resurrection of their forgotten peers is electrifying. For the first time, readers will see the many-limbed family tree of women writers working in all genres as Showalter traces branches of influence and extraordinary flowerings. Showalter astutely explores every aspect with wit and zeal. This superb, groundbreaking history will inspire readers to read each of these remarkable writers.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
From left: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Cynthia Ozick, Joan Didion. BY KATIE ROIPHE IT may be surprising that there's been no comprehensive history of women's writing in America. But Elaine Showalter has now undertaken this daunting venture with her vast democratic volume, "A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx," in which she energetically describes the work of long-forgotten writers and poets along with that of their more well-known contemporaries. In the 1970s, Showalter wrote "A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing," which established an alternative canon of British women writers at a moment when feminist studies were very much in vogue, and her new book is an attempt to do the same thing for American literature. Showalter was, for nearly two decades, a professor in the department of English literature at Princeton (she was the head of the department when I was graduate student there), and she remains a grande dame of feminist literary studies. It's worth noting that many of the most talented writers she discusses - Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion - objected to being categorized as women writers and preferred to think of themselves simply as writers. As Elizabeth Bishop put it, "art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc. into two sexes is to emphasize values that are not art." Showalter handles these rebels by corralling them into special subchapters with titles like "Dissenters." One of the dissenters, Cynthia Ozick, argued against expecting "artists who are women ... to deliver 'women's art,' as if 10,000 other possibilities, preoccupations, obsessions, were inauthentic, for women, or invalid, or worse yet, lyingly evasive." "A Jury of Her Peers" announces its inclusiveness with its size and heft, and the breadth of Showalter's research is indeed impressive; it seems there are women scribblers under every apple tree, in every city street and small-town cafe across our great nation. In fact, the encyclopedic nature of the book is both its satisfaction and its limitation. The entries are brisk, informative and often less than a page long. There are too many writers here to go into much depth about any of them, and one finds oneself, in many of the more absorbing passages of the book, wanting more. Of course, distilling any writer's life work into a brief entry entails a certain amount of glossing over. To cover so much territory necessitates a kind of breezy simplification, and that very breezy simplification is also the pleasure of this kind of ranging, inclusive history. Though she refers to "A Jury of Her Peers" as literary history, Showalter is less attentive to artistic merit, to what separates good fiction from bad, than to cultural significance; she is less concerned with the nuances of style or art than with the political ramifications of a book, or the spirited or adventurous behavior of its lady characters. She is not interested in whether the writers she discusses are good, or in the question of how their best writing works, but in whether they are exploring feminist themes. And so she ends up rooting through novels and poems for messages and meanings about women's position in society, for plots that criticize domesticity or that expound on the narrowness of women's lives. (She once coined the term "gynocritic" for critics freed "from the linear absolutes of male literary history.") This exploration of subversive plots and spunky heroines is fruitful from a purely historical point of view, but it doesn't always feel like literary criticism at its most sophisticated. One thinks of Joan Didion's line about feminists: "That fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur to these women, nor should it have, for fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology." Showalter is occasionally prone to bouts of reductionist readings that belong to a faded era of bell-bottoms and consciousness-raising groups, as when she says the elaborately drawn characters Gus Trenor, Percy Gryce and Simon Rosedale in Edith Wharton's "House of Mirth" are "products of their own crisis of gender," or when she writes that Sylvia Plath's richly nuanced poem "Daddy" "embodied women's rejection of patriarchal mythologies." But on the whole her writing is clear and lively and mercifully free of the fashionable jargon of academic criticism. Showalter's wide net draws in writers like Dorothy Canfield Fisher, whose novel, "The Home-Maker," written in 1924, includes the abysmally written passage: "What was her life? A hateful round of housework, which, hurry as she might, was never done. How she loathed housework! The sight of a dishpan full of dishes made her feel like screaming. And what else did she have? Loneliness; never-ending monotony; blank, gray days, one after another full of drudgery." Very few people, I imagine, would argue for the elegance of the prose, but the passage is undoubtedly interesting from a feminist point of view. And so the question becomes: Is this capacious, political way of looking at writing a flawed way to view the mysteries of literature? Willa Cather put it this way: "The mind that can follow a 'mission' is not an artistic one." Showalter's final section on modern women writers, with headings like "From Chick Lit to Chica Lit," is the flimsiest in the book. Where, one wonders, are some of the quirkier and more interesting talents of the past few decades, from Paula Fox to Mary Gaitskill to Claire Messud? Showalter spends too much time on frothy entertainments like Jennifer Weiner's "Good in Bed" and Terry McMillan's "Waiting to Exhale" at the expense of more serious literary work. Toward the end of this ambitious book, Showalter concludes that one "must be willing to assume the responsibility of judging. A peer is not restricted to explaining and admiring; quite the contrary." But one wishes there was more judgment in this book, more selection. The idea of resurrecting women's writing from the neglect of previous eras is a project of '70s feminism, but is the mere fact of being a woman and jotting down words in a notebook and then pubhshing them worthy of quite so many drums and trumpets? It may not be sensitive to say that some, just some, of the writers in this generous volume might have rightfully been relegated to obscurity, but one can't help thinking, at times, that literary history may have passed them over for a reason, just as it has passed over mediocre male writers. One also wonders about the sheer democracy of the project, the fair-minded curiosity about nearly every woman who thought to pick up a pen. Does Dorothy Canfield Fisher really merit as much space as Elizabeth Bishop? It is a vexed and knotty question: Is Showalter in some way devaluing the achievements of the greatest American writers by giving equal or greater space to the less talented? Is she slighting women writers by holding them to a standard that is not about artistic excellence, but about the political content or personal drama of their writing? In her brilliant essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" George Eliot wrote, "the severer critics are fulfilling a chivalrous duty in depriving the mere fact of feminine authorship of any false prestige which may give it a delusive attraction, and in recommending women of mediocre faculties - as at least a negative service they can render their sex - to abstain from writing." Still, this comprehensive record of American women's attempts at literary achievement holds its own fascination; the small, vivid portraits of women's lives are extremely readable and enlightening. Writing about times when women's stories were too often ignored, Showalter offers a series of vignettes about what their struggles consisted of and how difficult it was for a woman to forge a professional identity as a writer. She is concerned with the drama of women writing; the lives she describes are filled with abortions, divorces, affairs, unhappy marriages, postpartum depressions and suicides. Her short, incisive biographies offer a glimpse into the exotic travails of the past and the eternal concerns of female experience; and, of course, from a purely biographical standpoint the literary mediocrities can be as interesting as the successes. "A Jury of Her Peers" is likely to become an important and valuable resource for anyone interested in women's history. It outlines the rich and colorful history of women struggling to publish and define themselves, and the complex and tangled tradition of women's writing in this country. It also leaves us with many memorable moments, like Dorothy Parker praying, "Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman." Katie Roiphe teaches in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University and is the author of "Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages."
Choice Review
The appearance of "the first literary history of American Women" by a distinguished scholar is a noteworthy event. And in composing this clear, accessible, comprehensive survey of exactly what women wrote, Showalter (emer., Princeton Univ.) does not ride a theoretical hobbyhorse. Investigating what "literary peers" means and the codes and contexts of literary writing, the author points out that women writers are a unique historical category because they were defined from male viewpoints and by masculine standards. Moving chronologically from Bradstreet to the present, Showalter covers literary careers and personal narratives from the perspective of masculine literary influence and the expectations of the national marketplace. She reveals how women gradually escaped private and domestic definitions and moved toward professional writing that both included and exceeded traditional female experience (Showalter identified this pattern in A Literature of Their Own, CH, Oct'99, 37-0793). This important survey includes brief discussions of many minor figures as well as those the author believes to be most significant, namely, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Showalter concludes with Proulx and Jane Smiley. The volume includes extensive notes. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. S. A. Parker emerita, Hiram College
Library Journal Review
Women have been writing and publishing since the beginning of the American experience. But as Showalter argues convincingly in her substantial literary history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000, their contributions have been largely overlooked and underrated by the men who controlled "scholarly editorial boards, panels of consultants, and academic leadership posts." Each of the 20 chapters begins with the historical context of the period and an assessment of "women's relation to the literary marketplace" during that time. Within each chapter, Showalter (A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing) supplies biographical details and an assessment of the work of the writers she has identified as important. One of Showalter's judgments is that "[Harriet Beecher Stowe's] achievements and her wide influence make her the most important figure in the history of American women's writing." She also argues that Emily Dickinson "reinvented American poetry." Showalter's writing is clear, lively, and authoritative; her research is impressive. Recommended for academic and public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/08.]-Kathryn R. Bartelt, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.