The New Gynology: Writing on Women and Literature in the United States

Abstract

Elaine Showalter. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977. 378 pp. Marlene Ann Springer, ed. What Manner of Woman: Essays on English and American Life and Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1977. 357 4- xx pp. In a famous dictum, D. H. Lawrence said: "never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The tale has an independence, an integrity, a life of its own; the teller has feet of clay. Two recent books, What Manner of Woman and A Literature of Their Own, part of a wave of literature reflecting women's experience in a hostile society, tell a tale instructive, chilling, revelatory of a long tradition of oppression and misery that encourages resistance to tyrants. Sometimes, to the detriment of the tale, the tellers intrude and attempt to choreograph the readers' responses. What Manner of Woman, edited by Marlene Springer, is a collection of essays attempting to cover women in literature and society—in England from the fourteenth century to the present; in the United States from the seventeenth century to the present—in thirteen essays and an introduction. A Literature of Their Own, by Elaine Showalter, is an historical treatment of women writers in England from the Brontes to Margaret Drabble. While What Manner of Woman must make its mark through the uneven resultant of multiple scholarship, A Literature of Their Own focuses a single mind. Both books survey broad universes, putting a heavy impost on the authors to approach exhaustiveness and yet pay adequate attention to detail.