The vintage book of American women writers

Showalter follows her invigorating literary history A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (2009) with an equally substantial and exciting anthology encompassing 350 years and 79 writers of diverse backgrounds, locations, and literary styles, each introduced with brief, vivid biographical sketches. As Showalter observes, women's writing has been closely allied with the quest for not only women's rights but also universal human rights and justice, as well as literary exploration and excellence. Showalter's chronological survey of the literary mothers of us all takes measure of the great reach and splendid variety of women's writing and how it has illuminated America's continuing transformation and shaped American literature. Naturally, such pillars as Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Flannery O'Connor are present. But here, too, are versatile Lydia Maria Child, early African American writer Frances E. W. Harper, short story writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, courageous Kate Chopin, blacklisted Meridel Le Sueur, and on to Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick, Amy Tan, and Jhumpa Lahiri.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Overstuffed but still thin anthology highlighting women's contributions to Americanand worldliterature.In a frustratingly brief introduction, Princeton emerita professor Showalter signals her intent to make "available works by important American women writers from 1650 to the present"women whom she calls "the literary mothers of us all." She goes on to note, however, that both space considerations and the cost of copyright permissions prohibit including "many great women novelists." Poets and essayists suffer as well, and the anthology is a lopsided affair, with scarcely a word from Native American and Hispanic writers, from Leslie Silko or Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo or Denise Chavez. The anthology is somewhat better with African-American and Asian American writers, though again with some curious absences. That said, many of the selections show considerable awareness of the ethnic and economic diversity of American society, from a piece by Louisa May Alcott concerning a "contraband" slave to the little-known writer Mary Noailles Murfree, who, sandwiched between classics Sarah Orne Jewett and Kate Chopin, paints a richly detailed portrait of hardscrabble life in the Great Smoky Mountains. Some of the usual suspects are on hand, though some aren't; in a way, it's refreshing to find an anthology of this kind that does not include Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O.," though unusual to have no Welty at all. Showalter makes well-thought-through choices that avoid anthological clichs: The ever-problematic Mary Austin, for instance, is represented by two autobiographical pieces that are not often read these days, a century after they were written, while it's perhaps daring but smart to represent the always wonderful Willa Cather with a story from her debut book of short stories rather than her better-known mature novels. An anthology of this sort is impossible, of course, without founders Anne Bradstreet ("I am obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits") and Mary Rowlandson, though Showalter's headnotes are too brief and cursory to give uninitiated readers much sense of why they're important in the larger scheme of things.A mixed bag, then: a one-of-a-kind anthology that, though large, needs to be larger still to do its job, and that begs for more extensive annotation and context.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Introduction by Elaine Showalter The Mothers of Us all Since they first began to appear in print over 350 years ago, American women writers have publicly insisted that they did not care about literary fame or immortality. Anne Bradstreet, whose book The Tenth Muse Newly Sprung Up in America was published in 1650, declared that she was contented with her humble domestic niche as a Puritan housewife and mother, and denied any interest in winning the laurel wreath or other poetic awards. If men did her the honor of reading her poems, she wrote, "Give thyme or parsley wreath, I ask no bays." In other words, Bradstreet was content to be the Poet Parsleyate, rather than the Poet Laureate, and her imagery of the kitchen of Parnassus would be echoed by many American women writers who came after her. Hoping for fame seemed unfeminine and self-aggrandizing, and they denied that such ambition inspired them to write. Rather than admitting their own ambitions, promoting their own creativity, or claiming their place in their nation's literary history, the founding mothers of American literature were more likely to avoid publicity and to deprecate their own achievements. They published anonymously or under a pseudonym, and they wrote conflicted accounts of their own longings to write. Lydia Maria Child signed her first novel, Hobomok (1824), "By an American"; she had been warned "that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book." Child ruefully noted in her diary that for Christmas her husband had given her a laurel wreath, but "the leaves . . . were not very abundant." When reviews of their works were scanty or harsh, women writers suffered in silence. But American male writers were more forthright and enterprising. When Leaves of Grass received only a handful or horrified reviews, Walt Whitman reviewed it himself--anonymously--as a work of genius by a true "American bard." Meanwhile, his great contemporary, Emily Dickinson, steadfastly refused to publish more than a handful of her poems during her lifetime. Yet American women writers also believed that they were fully equal to the challenge of creating an American literature for a new nation. Women's rights and women's writing were closely allied after the Declaration of Independence. In 1792, Judith Sargent Murray wrote that women "were equally susceptible of literary acquirement," and envisaged herself "supplying the American stage with American scenes." Child and her generation of writers dedicated themselves to literature of their "native land." They shared common themes as well individual genius. From the beginning, they wrote with sympathy about the outcast, the slave, the Native American, the madwoman. They wrote dark fables about marriage. Over the centuries, they wrote both directly and figuratively about female experience and female sexuality, from abortion to menopause. They were fascinated by the images of the circus, the carnival, and the freak in relation to the situation of the odd woman and the artist. But they also wrote about male experience and, from the masculine perspective, about cowboys, ranchers, soldiers, boxers, and killers. The range of women's writing is much wider in subject and style than is generally supposed. However, even when they were praised and celebrated in their own day, whether as bestsellers like Harriet Beecher Stowe or Nobel Prize-winners like Pearl Buck, American women writers have tended to disappear from literary history and national memory. I explore the multiple reasons for this phenomenon in my book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx . But the main reason women do not figure in American literary history is because they have not been the ones to write it. And in the twenty-first century, we need historical chronology, literary contexts, and the sense of continuity as steps toward doing the fullest justice to American women's writing. We need a sense of chronology to see how women writers fit on the literary timeline of American literature, to understand them as belonging to and affecting literary traditions, and not simply as isolated and exceptional women who popped up from time to time. We need to see women writers in context, placed in relation to their contemporaries and their precursors. Finally, we need a canon of outstanding women writers over the past four centuries both to organize their history and to begin the arguments that keep literary discussion alive. I intend this anthology both as a companion to A Jury of Her Peers , making available works by important American women writers from 1650 to the present; and also as a portable and readable introduction to the literary mothers of us all. Obviously it cannot claim to be comprehensive. I have had to leave out many great women novelists because of limitations of space, and some contemporary writers because of the expense of copyright permission. But The Vintage Book of American Women Writers is a collection of wonderful stories, essays, fables, and poems by a remarkable group of writers who have shaped our literary heritage. Excerpted from The Vintage Book of American Women Writers by Elaine Showalter All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.