With her clear-sighted, ambitious study A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Knopf), feminist scholar and critic Elaine Showalter, professor emerita at Princeton University, has done for our women writers what she accomplished for their British counterparts in A Literature of Their Own: brought forth generations of overlooked, undervalued, excluded, and marginalized female writers—with their more celebrated counterparts—into fresh, plenary light.
Showalter's opus is minutely researched and rich with opinion, anecdotes, samples, and interpretation. She begins in the 1600s with colonial-era women: Mary Rowlandson, for one, whose narrative of captivity by the Narragansett Indians had to be vetted, edited, and approved by male relatives and other "authorities"—a common practice—before the work could be published. Readers are rewarded in this singular volume with evidence of the whole myriad of subjects rendered in poetry and prose by women through the centuries—domesticity, interior life, madness, race, childbirth, war, gender issues, erotica, religion, the immigrant experience—in a plethora of forms and formats: practical manuals, journalism, cookbooks, travel writing, romances, crime stories, diaries, utopian novels.
Showalter showcases the knowns (Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison) and places them alongside their lesser or less-remembered peers (Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, Ann Beattie), enlarging and recasting the way we look at and think about the complex, often vexed, and suppressed history of women's contributions to American literature. Throughout, she attributes to the work of familiar and unfamiliar writers alike a signature characteristic that aids our understanding of how each one has enriched the pantheon. Thus, a chapter on the literary zeitgeist of the first half of the twentieth century tags one section "The Genius of Them All—Gertrude Stein."
One question that Showalter poses in her introduction is why female writers have so often seemed to disappear from U.S. literary history. This monumental volume is both a correction to that vanishing and a celebration of the lives and works of so very many of these now-rediscovered authors.