A JURY OF HER PEERS: AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS FROM ANNE BRADSTREET TO ANNIE PROULX

Elaine Showalter

Virago, Hardback, 400pp.,ISBN 978-1844080786, Price: £22.50

Janette Currie

In her latest book, Elaine Showalter revisits the contested territory of her pioneering study of English women writers, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977). A Jury of Her Peers concentrates on the American counterparts and as such, attempts to reshape American literary heritage. Showalter aims to make the “invisible visible” by shining a light on “neglected” and “forgotten” American women writers and their more enduringly famous sisters.

Audacious in scope, A Jury of her Peers examines over four centuries of American women’s writing, positioned within pertinent social and historical contexts. Engaging and accessible, Showalter masks her scholarly credentials in plain prose. She is brilliant at encapsulating the period significance and essential qualities of the writers and their works. Here she is on “American Eliots”:

During Reconstruction, the clash between old ideals and new aspirations, the Lost Cause and the woman’s cause, inspired Southern women’s interest in Eliot’s realism and broad social understanding. “The old life of the south has passed away,” says a character in Sherwood Bonner’s Like Unto Like (1878). “It only remains for the genius of a George Eliot to grasp these old materials, and from their wreck build a memorial of its glory in a Southern ‘Middlemarch’ ”. (177)

Showalter, rightly, gives a whole chapter to a discussion of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, “not only because they were giants of their age, but also because of their commitment to an art beyond the limitation of gender. [...] American women’s writing could not fully mature until there were women writing against it” (271). By ‘writing’ Showalter really means fiction and poetry. There is very little discussion of non-fiction, biography, history, or scholarship. Many of her own peers are absent. For example, there is an adroit analysis of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping:

[A] significant novel of the eighties … a haunting, metaphoric novel about two kinds of women—those women in the tradition of Anne Sexton’s “Housewife,” or Shirley Jackson’s novels about agoraphobia, who like to keep their houses and to stay in their own rooms, however small, dark, and poor; and those less visible women, in the tradition of the fairy tale, science fiction, and utopian narrative, who cannot be housekeepers or be kept in their houses.(472)

Yet, Robinson the essayist and political activist only gets the barest mention: [Robinson] “only wrote nonfiction for twenty-four years before publishing her second novel, Gilead (2004)” (474).

In a work of such breadth, in its selection and organisation and wide-ranging array of writers, there are the inevitable casualties and flaws. Pulitzer-prize-winning Anne Tyler published the first of her thirteen novels in the 1960s. However, Showalter categorises her under the 1980s because it marks “her breakout decade” (474). Tyler is a popular author who writes uplifting novels about families, marriage, children and the humdrumness of carrying on. In her democratic novels, women are not passive victims of circumstance but make choices. They are equals, accepted by and speaking from positions of authority. At pains to shine a light on the “forgotten” women writers, many of whom are dismissed as “sentimental”, Showalter is in danger of marginalizing Tyler, who occupies less than one page out of the 586 because, it would seem, she writes ‘popular’ fiction about the human experience. Another Ann, Ann Patchett (The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician’s Assistant (1997), Bel Canto (2001), Run (2008)) is left out from the listing of her contemporary peers, which includes Alice Sebold, Amy Tan and Jodi Picoult.

Keeping with Virginia Woolf’s assertion that a woman needs to be freed from the daily drudgery of domesticity in order to create, or have “a room of one’s own”, Showalter follows a chronological organisation to confirm her thesis that American women writers have escaped from the confinement of domesticity and social pressure and now are “free” to “take on any subject they want, in any form they choose.” Under this scenario, the 1990s is a watershed, the endgame of the female struggle for equal acceptance within the traditional male canon. This is patently not true. However, Showalter anticipates debate with knowing asides. “I am aware that literary judgments are subjective” (xviii) she admits in the introduction. Beguiling, bewitching, with A Jury of her Peers Showalter entices us to believe in the truth of her thesis.