Volume 28, Number 2 · February 19, 1981
A Room of Her Own
By Helen Vendler
Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson
by Margaret Homans
Princeton University Press, 272 pp., $14.75
Many vocations are discouraged by life. Able people fail to become the doctors, or writers, or mothers that we say they were 'meant' to be, had it not been for institutional rigidity, or psychic inhibition, or biological infertility. The causes of a stifled poetic vocation are so multiple (from the intellectual isolation and poverty that made Gray's village Miltons mute and inglorious to the qualities of personality that made Wordsworth's brother John what Wordsworth called 'a silent poet') that an investigation of inhibited or difficult poetic vocation in women is evidently assailable on innumerable grounds, no matter what its virtues. Consequently, Margaret Homans's intelligent, if rather non-literary, study of poetic identity in women writers is subject to a thousand objections. Homans chooses on the whole not to acknowledge them or defend herself against them, but to continue serenely with her argument—a serious, consistent, and close-woven one. If Homans provokes dissent, she does so as good teachers do; she has a point of view, it is her own, it issues as thought not propaganda, it is ably illustrated, and it is informed by feeling.
Review, 2459 words
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