Self-Made Women

John Sutherland

  • The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present edited by Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy and Patricia Clements
    Batsford, 1231 pp, £35.00, August 1990, ISBN 0 7134 5848 8
  • The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel by Richard Altick
    Ohio State, 854 pp, $45.00, March 1991, ISBN 0 8142 0518 6

The Feminist Companion to Literature in English is itself the product of impressive feminist companionship. Listed in the preamble are three editors, four consulting editors, 12 contributing editors, and 54 ‘contributors’ – all women, all university teachers. Academic addresses range over three continents (Asia and Africa are missing, although women writers from those corners of the world are generously represented). Vigorous give and take formed the book, which has no obvious predecessor and had to work out its own shape. ‘We have argued, laughed, fought, forgiven, and feasted together at one another’s tables,’ the editors record. A particularly sharp fight must have been fought on the nature of the entries. The editors settled on a conservative dictionary of biography format with a leavening of category entries on such topics as ‘Pseudonyms’, ‘Black Feminist Criticism’, ‘Science Fiction’. There are no plot summaries, no entries on works or on principal characters in works, no cross-reference one-liners. The gaze is unblinkingly on women’s lives as the ground from which women’s writing springs.

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