Literary Sisterhoods: Imagining Women Artists. Deborah Heller. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005; illustrations; xiii + 182 pages; ISBN 07735-2909-8; $27.95 (paper).
In Literary Sisterhoods: Imagining Women Artists, Deborah Heller casts her eye over five authors writing across Europe and North America, from the start of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth: Germaine de Staël, George Eliot, Anna Banti, Alice Munro, and Grace Paley. By juxtaposing their fiction, Heller aims to chart a feminist "genealogy of the figure of the woman artist" (3). Combining close readings with biographical and cultural analyses, she explores the affinities and contrasts between her authors, the authors and their fictional artists, and the artist figures and other characters in the texts.
As Heller suggests, these relationships are striking, worthy of critical pursuit. She highlights the dialogues her central authors took up with each other and with authors whose works figure more tacitly in the study. Heller opens the chapter on Eliot's Daniel Deronda with Eliot's assessment of Staël as "a woman of great intellectual power" and references to Staël's Corinne in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch; she notes Staël's influence on George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who were in turn "enormously admired" by Eliot (37). Heller effectively turns our attention to the rich and diverse ways her authors develop their characters, and how their characters engage with each other: she considers, for example, Banti's mix of fiction, biography, and history in
Artemisia, and observes Banti's experiments with the boundaries between her narrator and artist. Heller often avoids forcing simple parallels among her subjects, and points to the differing cultural contexts that create distances between modern readers and Staël and Eliot in particular.
Aspects of Heller's critique are questionable, however, and could have been strengthened by a differently balanced approach. Her chapter on Grace Paley fills one third of the book and is about three times the length of the other chapters. Heller argues that because Paley's artist, Faith, appears in many of her short stories, a longer analysis of these texts is in order. She takes an extensive look at Faith's personal perceptions and relationships, her social consciousness and activism - all of which do much to shape her character, but take space from a deeper consideration of Faith as an author. Here, I am left curious about how Faith responds to the other writers and writing subjects in Paley's stories, the "metafictional play" (112) between Paley and Faith, as well as the challenge of reading Faith as an author when her creative identity is so often flexible, elusive. A more concise study of Faith also might have allowed for elaboration on the glimpses Heller offers of the reception histories of her other authors. (Her brief comments on Corinne's readers are especially intriguing.) Occasionally, Heller's statements on her artists' continued relevance are heavyhanded: "these writers and their subjects, in their different ways, can help illuminate our own separate and shared worlds" (13); Eliot's "novel may still engage us, move us, and even make us weep" (35). These comments read as unnecessary because the ideas explored by each author and the critical questions raised by Heller are provocative themselves.
Kathryn Holland Oxford University