My review of Elaine Showalter’s book A Jury of Her Peers is now up at the Quarterly Conversation. The short version is that I liked it. If you want to hear more, check it out!
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- "…whatever these futilities of mine may be, I have no intention of hiding them, any more than I would a bald and grizzled portrait of myself just because the artist had painted not a perfect face but my own. Anyway these are my humours, my opinions: I give them as things which I believe, not as things to be believed. My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me." Michel de Montaigne
- "If I am asked to explain why I learned the bicycle I should say I did it as an act of grace, if not of actual religion." Frances E. Willard
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Of Books and Bicycles 
I did check it out and really enjoyed it.
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Thanks for posting, Dorothy, I really enjoyed reading it! Well done.
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Nice review! I hadn’t realized that there has never been a history of American women writers before. I wonder if Showalter should have made it a two volume work then so she could be more critical and fit in more writers? But at least it is a start and hopefully others will follow. Now, if I only had time to read it for myself. It’s sitting on a pile just over there…
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Wonderful review Dorothy. I really do need to get to this–it sounds interesting despite not necessarily breaking new ground. It’s still nice to see a little attention paid to American women writers (even if she left some notable authors out). I had no idea where the title came from–that sounds like an interesting story and the perfect choice for this book.
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Congratulations on a terrific review! I can appreciate that the author was upfront in her personal preferences — who was included, and who was not — though I agree that a “further reading” section would have been most helpful.
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Lilian — thank you for the compliment, and thank you for stopping by this blog – welcome!
Mr. W. — thank you! I’m so glad you read and enjoyed it. I learned a lot from reading her book and am glad I decided to.
Stefanie — I wonder if a two-volume work might have been harder to sell, or maybe she wanted to keep it cheap enough for general readers to buy. Anyway, a fuller treatment would have been nice, but at least we have a start that might lead to longer projects later.
Danielle — the story IS a perfect title for the book, and I recommend it if you come across it in one of your anthologies. It’s a story I teach now and then, and it also exists in play form (called Trifles). Thanks for reading the review!
Debby — thank you! I liked her openness about her opinions as well, and that she declared she would include opinions at the very beginning, so I knew what I was getting into. The book is an excellent resource as it is, but a further reading section would have made it even better.
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