A JURY OF HER PEERS: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
Elaine Showalter
Alfred A. Knopf, $65, hbk.
Review by Susan Salter Reynolds
The title of this, the "first literary history of American women writers ever written," explains Elaine Showalter, comes from a 1917 short story of the same name by a young journalist, Susan Glaspell.
The story is based on the murder trial of an Iowa farm wife who strangled her husband after enduring years of cruelty and abuse.
When two peers located potentially incriminating evidence, they concealed it to protect the abused woman from "the patriarchal system of the law".
Glaspell died in 1948, all but disappearing from literary history.
Showalter doesn't much like it when really good writers like Glaspell fall off the literary map.
This means that while much of the book conjures names good readers know, it is happily punctuated by names we've never seen, stories we never knew existed.
Showalter has organised the book by decades, beginning in 1650, when Anne Bradstreet, a settler from England in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote the first book by a woman living in America.
Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America is a collection of poems describing the difficulties and joys of being a settler, wife and mother.
It was published in London and required 11 testimonials by male friends, family and critics to convince the publisher it was indeed written by a woman and worthy of publication.
It was followed by Mary Rowlandson's 1682 memoir of her abduction by Narragansett Indians, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. In this genre, "captivity narratives," American women first distinguished themselves as writers.
As education became more widespread for women, they branched out into poetry, best-selling fiction and political satire.
In 1794, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple appeared in America, becoming the first best-selling novel there by a woman and opening the floodgates for other female novelists.
By the early 1800s, women entered the publishing industry, editing periodicals with titles like Ladies, Mother and Home, as well as anthologies and annuals.
Although the 1850s are considered a golden age in American letters, with male luminaries like Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne, they were also, as Showalter quotes literary historian David S. Reynolds, the "American Woman's Renaissance," influenced to a large degree by the enormous popularity of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, published in America in 1848.
The increase in "domestic novels" written by women inspired vitriolic reviews and threatened marriages.
Nathaniel Hawthorne told his publisher William Ticknor, "Ink-stained women are, without a single exception, detestable."
For their part, writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe noted the many interruptions a woman had to face: "Nothing but deadly determination enables me to ever write - it is rowing against wind and tide."
The mid-19th century was a renaissance for black women's writing and slave narratives that invigorated a flagging book publishing market that had perhaps seen a surfeit of domestic novels.
Now and then, Showalter is called upon to untangle the waves of criticism and revival that works by writers including Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edna St Vincent Millay and Eudora Welty have endured.
Her approach in this thorny landscape (feminist criticism can be fierce) is unifying and magnanimous.
She brings a perspective to changing literary culture that makes criticism seem not only understandable but also healthy and invigorating, making the work timeless in its ability to weather readers' changing priorities.
The early 1900s saw the end of the Victorian Age and the birth of Modernism - many women in this next generation did not want to be defined as "women writers"; some, such as Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, openly criticised female writers.
Showalter hardly needs to point out that this open criticism among female writers is far preferable to the silence or condescension previously offered by male critics.
In 1920, women got the vote.
Women wrote with renewed vigour of the difficulties of writing and running a home: Short-story writer Katherine Anne Porter spoke of the "curious idea of feminine availability in all spiritual ways and in giving service to anyone who demands it.
"And I suppose that's why it has taken me 20 years to write this novel," she said of Ship of Fools - "It's been interrupted by just anyone who could jimmy his way into my life."
Many Southern writers - Carson McCullers, Welty - hail from the century's first 50 years.
Black American writers such as poet Gwendolyn Brooks, novelist Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, found their voices in this period.
In the first half of the 20th century, critics such as Louise Bogan, Mary McCarthy and others discovered new writers, rebelled against the ghettoisation of female writers and fastened the work of women writers in the cultural consciousness of the century.
Activists like Adrienne Rich and Grace Paley opened the eyes of readers to the working class.
Gail Godwin wrote about life as a working woman; Erica Jong and others about sexual liberation.
By the 1970s, Joan Didion and others were attacking the women's movement, accusing feminists of "narcissism, ignorance, and sloth."
By the 1980s, Showalter writes, "Women fully joined the literary juries of the United States . . . No longer dependent on judgements that denied them representation."
By the 1990s, Showalter writes, women dominated the book market, buying between 70% and 90% of all fiction, and she notes a rise in women's gothic - works by Mary Karr, Kathryn Harrison, Dorothy Allison, Susanna Moore and Alice Sebold that did not shy from violence.
She also notes an ethnic cross-fertilisation, with second-generation immigrants including Gish Jen and Julia Alvarez.
She ends this remarkable book with Jane Smiley and Annie Proulx, both equally comfortable writing from male and female perspectives.
Showalter has spent her life, in and out of academia (she is professor emeritus of English and Avalon professor of the humanities at Princeton) writing, thinking and lecturing on literature and judging literary prizes.
A Jury of Her Peers does an enormous service, houses a drop-dead reading list and gives the reader a fluid framework for the great (much of it still undiscovered) wealth of writing by women in the United States.
