A review by margedalloway
A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing by Elaine Showalter

3.0

A extremely industrious and edifying study. Showalter’s knowledge of British women’s literature is impressively broad, and the blend of textual history and analysis is rather satisfying. However I did find some of the analysis, the comparisons between Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot in particular, to be something of a reach. Furthermore, I found almost all of the chapter on Woolf creepy, for lack of a better word. There was a lot of discussion of her biography and her body (especially menstruation/menopause). The final chapter on Angela Carter and literature since the book was first published also makes the structure rather ungainly. Despite all of this, it is an extremely important book, and it’s more materialist approach provides a useful foil to the more post-structuralist feminist criticism.