Elaine Showalter is preparing a literary history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.
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1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1946-1949, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1950-1959, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1960-1969, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1970-1979, Biography and memoirs, Biography, Americas, North America, USA, Literature and literary criticism, Poetry
Vol. 13 No. 21 · 7 November 1991
page 17 | 1810 words
Fame at last
Elaine Showalter
- Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook
Virago, 488 pp, £20.00, November 1991, ISBN 1 85381 406 7
I met Anne Sexton six months before her suicide, in April 1974. My colleague Carol Smith and I were doing a series of interviews with women writers, and we had heard how Sexton and her friend Maxine Kumin had worked together for years, talking about their poems in long telephone sessions when neither of then could get out of the house. We wanted to ask them about their relationship as house-wives, friends and poets, and so it was arranged that they should come to give a joint poetry reading at Douglass College, where we taught, and that we should meet with them in the afternoon before the reading.
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 24 · 19 December 1991
From A. Banerjee
Elaine Showalter’s assertions (LRB, 7 November) about the importance of Anne Sexton’s work remain just that: assertions, unsupported by critical argument or analysis. Among Sexton’s ‘credentials for acceptance in poetry’, Showalter cites her salesmanship and marketing, together with her mental illness: her ‘having graduated from a number of Boston’s finest mental establishments and finally, with the class of 1973, becoming an alumna of McLean Hospital, alma mater of Lowell and Plath’. This strange reasoning is perhaps meant to be understood in the context of Showalter’s apparent acceptance of the biographer’s diagnosis of the cause of Sexton’s illness: ‘the social confusions of growing up in a female body and of living as a woman in post-war American society’. But even those poets of the time who grew up in ‘male bodies’, people like Lowell, Berryman and Jarrell, also suffered from mental illnesses, and two of them committed suicide. So the problem asks to be seen in terms of the contemporary cultural situation, which the poets found inimical, rather than in terms of gender.
A. Banerjee
Kobe College, Nishinomiya,
