Showalter's new literary history of American women writers

Elaine Showalter has a new book out, A JURY OF HER PEERS: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. It is a comprehensive, chronological overview of American novelists and poets, more documentary than literary criticism, but some of the sections on well-known writers like Alcott, Stowe, and Wharton are particularly excellent.

Unlike Showalter's first -- and revolutionary -- book on British women novelists, A Literature of Their Own, this volume does not fundamentally alter the way you will read every book discussed, but it is a delight for the "lost" writers who are rediscovered and its portraits of women's friendships.

In start contrast to their Victorian and Edwardian sisters across the Atlantic, many American women did manage to earn a living (at least for a while) as writers and to also become mothers. But it was at quite a cost, including the deaths of children or of the mother in childbirth, or a precarious widowhood. Too many ended their lives in poverty and silence. Without Jane Austen's well-connected brothers or Virginia Woolf's 500 pounds a year income, these women lived through the difficult political and economic times and bitter racial unrest of a young nation -- and they did it all without birth control.