Volume 23, Number 5 · April 1, 1976
Heroine Addiction
By Michael Wood
Literary Women
by Ellen Moers
Doubleday, 336 pp., $10.00
'Once I thought,' Ellen Moers writes in her preface, 'that segregating major writers from the general course of literary history simply because of their sex was insulting.' I confess I thought so too before I read her book, and even now I'm not convinced we were entirely wrong. The segregation of women writers from men, however it is done, must, in the present state of the game, carry a large streak of condescension. Moers says she used to find Elizabeth Gaskell and Anne Brontë boring, while she could 'barely read' Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But 'reading them anew as women writers' taught her how to 'get excited' about them. She means to say that the fact that these writers were women is important, and of course she is right. But she is on the edge of saying they are not bad writers considering they are women, and her whole book hovers on just this edge.
Review, 2425 words
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