SB
's political activities included steady opposition to France's colonial war in Algeria, and lifelong support for socialism and feminism. Elaine Showalter
has written that SB
's feminist credentials stem from her writing, and...
Literary responses
Charlotte Brontë
Most major shifts in second-wave feminist literary criticism have been marked by influential rereadings of Jane Eyre: Ellen Moers
(1976) and Elaine Showalter
(1977) in the assertion of a female literary tradition; the Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective
Textual Features
Rhoda Broughton
In this novel the motherless narrator-heroine, Nell Le Strange, falls in love with a handsome young soldier, but false stories of his infidelity (with a letter forged by Nell's sister) break up the affair. Nell...
Literary responses
Pearl S. Buck
Maxine Hong Kingston
, meanwhile, said in 1992 that her search for Chinese women's voices was first answered by PSB
's work.
Conn, Peter. Pearl S. Buck. A Cultural Biography. Cambridge University Press.
83, n93
Elaine Showalter
has written that it is time for Buck to...
Literary responses
Mary Cholmondeley
Most literary reviews were positive, some comparing MC
to Charlotte Brontë
or George Eliot
; The Spectator called the novel brilliant and exhilarating.
Colby, Vineta. “’Devoted Amateur’: Mary Cholmondeley and Red Pottage”. Essays in Criticism, Vol.
20
, No. 2, pp. 213-28.
214
An Edinburgh Review article written in 1900 praised Red Pottage in...
Publishing
Dinah Mulock Craik
The undated second issue of the first edition added a frontispiece.
Burmester, James et al. English Books. James Burmester Rare Books.
This original fairy tale features the Prince Dolor, who is crippled as an infant, deprived of his rule by a Prince Regent uncle, and brought up in miserable conditions. A fairy godmother gives him a...
Literary responses
Dinah Mulock Craik
Elaine Showalter
initiated feminist interest in DMC
, first with a substantial article and then with treatment of her as a paradigmatic feminine novelist who promoted domesticity as a defensive strategy.
Showalter, Elaine. “Dinah Mulock Craik and the Tactics of Sentiment: A Case Study in Victorian Female Authorship”. Feminist Studies, Vol.
2
, pp. 5-23.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton University Press.
Elaine Showalter
has called this story clever, playful and unpretentious.
Showalter, Elaine. “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble”. Guardian Weekly, p. 40.
40
Textual Features
Margaret Drabble
The woman of the title story is experiencing the liberation of second-wave feminism, but working a heavy double shift, with a brilliant and enviable career but a resentful, punitive husband. The smile is purely a...
Literary responses
Helen Dunmore
Amid a chorus of welcoming and appreciative reviewers, Elaine Showalter
in the Guardian was highly critical.
Literary responses
Sarah Stickney Ellis
SSE
was viewed with ambivalence by a later generation of critics who sought to reclaim women's literature. Sandra Gilbert
and Susan Gubar
, for example, read Ellis as a willing captive in a separate sphere...
Literary responses
Maggie Gee
Elaine Showalter
picked this as a favourite read of the year, saying that it brilliantly negotiates the explosive racial territory that it stakes out.
“2009 in Review: Christmas Books”. Guardian Weekly.
54
Publishing
Sarah Grand
She started writing this novel in 1895 and finished it by September 1897.
Grand, Sarah. Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand: Volume 2. Editor Forward, Stephanie, Routledge.
46, 59-60
Elaine Showalter
wrote the introduction to Virago
's 1980 edition, and Sally Mitchell
wrote that of Thoemmes
, 1994.
Elaine Showalter
brought SG
to the attention of late-twentieth-century New Woman and feminist criticism in A Literature of Their Own, 1977, where she discussed The Heavenly Twins and The Beth Book.
Mangum, Teresa. Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel. University of Michigan Press.
220
Since...
Timeline
1977: Elaine Showalter published A Literature of...
Writing climate item
1977
Elaine Showalter
published A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë
to Lessing, an important work in women's literary history.
26 September 1991: Elaine Showalter published Sister's Choice:...
Writing climate item
26 September 1991
Elaine Showalter
published Sister's Choice: Traditions and Change in American Women's Writing , complement or sequel to her book of British women's literary history, A Literature of Their Own, 1977.
By early March 2009: Elaine Showalter published A Jury of Her...
Writing climate item
By early March 2009
Elaine Showalter
published A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet
to Annie Proulx.
Texts
Showalter, Elaine. “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman by Margaret Drabble”. Guardian Weekly, p. 40.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton University Press, 1977.
Showalter, Elaine. “Dinah Mulock Craik and the Tactics of Sentiment: A Case Study in Victorian Female Authorship”. Feminist Studies, Vol.
2
, pp. 5-23.
Showalter, Elaine. “Emily Dickinson unlaced”. Guardian Weekly, p. 34.
Showalter, Elaine. “Eternal Triangles in Cyberspace”. Guardian Weekly, p. 18.
Showalter, Elaine, and Olive Schreiner. “Introduction”. The Story of an African Farm, Bantam, 1993, p. vii - xxi.
Rossetti, Christina, and Dinah Mulock Craik. Maude; On Sisterhoods; A Woman’s Thoughts about Women. Editor Showalter, Elaine, New York University Press, 1993.
Showalter, Elaine. “Sisters at odds”. The Guardian, p. G2, 18.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. Pantheon Books, 1985.
Showalter, Elaine. “The Snowman Cometh”. London Review of Books, p. 35.
Showalter, Elaine. “Witnesses of the word”. The Guardian, p. Review 10.
