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“... On 13 December 1938, the young writer Jean Stafford, visiting Boston from her hometown, Boulder, Colorado, agreed to go for a ride in his father’s Packard with her 21-year-old suitor Robert Lowell. They had met the year before at a Colorado Writers’ Conference, and Lowell had been courting her intensely through the mails. When she refused to marry him, however, Lowell went into a rage and crashed the car into an embankment ...”

“... The posthumous English publication of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s mammoth novel Shadows on the Hudson has created such a tumel. Critics have been arguing about the quality of the novel, originally serialised in 1957-58 in the New York Yiddish newspaper the Forward; and about the reasons Singer did not have it translated during his lifetime. It has been compared to the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but also condemned as a melodramatic mishmash ...”

“... Beauvoir’s writing, too, has always had a strong undercurrent of hostility and condescension. As Elaine Marks notes in her introduction to Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir, many who have written about her work present her as ‘a slightly ridiculous figure, naive in her passions, sloppy in her scholarship, inaccurate in her documentation, generally out ...”

“... Ours is not an age in which literary events get much attention, but the publication in the New Yorker last August of Janet Malcolm’s study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was an exception. Brilliantly packaged with reprints of the Plath poems which the New Yorker had originally published, the issue was a sell-out on both sides of the Atlantic, and for weeks no dinner party from Hampstead to the Hamptons was complete without a discussion of it ...”

“... One of the​ biggest draws in New York this season is the Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the current cultural scene ...”

“... On 11 November 2001, the New York Times announced a major literary discovery. Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the African-American Studies Department at Harvard, had bought at auction the unpublished manuscript of the ‘earliest known novel by a female African-American slave and probably the earliest known novel by a black woman anywhere’. According to the article, the novel, signed by Hannah Crafts and called ‘The Bondwoman’s Narrative’, was the story of a woman’s life as a house slave on the North Carolina plantation of John Hill Wheeler, her escape to New Jersey in 1857, and her composition of an autobiographical fiction incorporating ‘elements of the many sentimental sagas she had evidently borrowed from Mr Wheeler’s shelf ...”

“... feminist heroine sans pareil, didn’t approve of heroines. Great Women – or ‘icons’, as Elaine Showalter prefers to call the three centuries’ worth of feminist ‘rule-breakers and path-blazers’ celebrated in her new book – get short shrift in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: I shall not lay any stress on the example of a few women ...”

“... of the same name, the discordant high-pitched tones of Strauss’s Salome resonate throughout Elaine Showaltcr’s Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. The discordant notes are apt because all three works point to a breaking-up, to a fragmentation and dislocation of cultural traditions and values during the last part of the 19th and ...”

“... axioms. They were followed by two key books from America, Ellen Moers’s Literary Women and Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own, both of which undertook a valuable adjustment of emphasis when it came to the discussion of works by women writers. One of the most stimulating kinds of literary speculation involves the reading of past works ...”

“... the “third world” of the mental patients themselves’. For this reason, among many others, Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady is to be welcomed, for its primary focus is upon this neglected group – for the most part, on female patients. Her account makes it plain that in the psychiatric domain, as in the conventionally-defined Third ...”

“... Old Town. Social class, inevitably, raises its head from time to time throughout these essays. Elaine Showalter sees the anti-heroes of Ladlit as obsessed with class distinctions, as well as being ‘funny, bright . . . charming and excruciatingly honest’. They are not gentlemen, but neither are they yobs. The volume reprints a ...”

“... this would be comic if it weren’t so alarming. What they are resisting, with such vehemence, is Showalter’s claim that they are just depressed. By calling their condition a syndrome, sufferers want to give it the dignity of a strictly medical and physical origin. They also want to escape the responsibility for their state which would be unavoidable if it ...”

“... concerns converge on the linked topics of sexuality, hysteria, imitation and iatrogeny. Following Elaine Showalter, Roy Porter and other scholars, Appignanesi presents hysteria as the pathology that, more startlingly than any other, reveals the paradoxes of imitation and selfhood, expression and collusion and control, as they play out between (usually ...”

“... so vividly by these writers. Much of the material will be familiar to readers of Ellen Moers and Elaine Showalter (and the writing is sometimes repetitious), yet it will be useful in showing inexperienced or blinkered readers the existence and nature of a female literary tradition. Sylvia Plath’s best late poetry often has the voice of the rebellious ...”

“... often, sad to relate, it’s hard to tell the difference. Surveying the field in these pages. Elaine Showalter (14 June 1990) argued that no biographical revelations could undermine Beauvoir’s standing as a feminist: her ‘feminist credentials come from her writing, and from her years of staunch, courageous and generous support of ... the cause of ...”