A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
Book DescriptionA Jury of Her Peersis an unprecedented literary landmark: the first comprehensive history of  American women writers from 1650 to 2000.In a narrative of immense scope and fascination--brimming with Elaine Showalter’s characteristic wit  and incisive opinions--we are introduced to more than 250 female writers. These include not only famous  and expected names (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O’Connor, Gwendolyn  Brooks, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, and Jodi Picoult among them), but also many who were once  successful and acclaimed yet now are little known, from the early American best-selling novelist  Catherine Sedgwick to the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Susan Glaspell. Showalter shows how these  writers--both the enduring stars and the ones left behind by the canon--were connected to one another  and to their times. She believes it is high time to fully integrate the contributions of women into our  American literary heritage, and she undertakes the task with brilliance and flair, making the case for  the unfairly overlooked and putting the overrated firmly in their place.Whether or not readers agree with the book’s roster of writers, A Jury of Her Peers is an  irresistible invitation to join the debate, to discover long-lost great writers, and to return to  familiar titles with a deeper appreciation. It is a monumental work that will greatly enrich our  understanding of American literary history and culture.Amazon Exclusive: Elaine Showalter's Top Ten Books by American Women Writers You Haven't Read (But Should)Everyone knows the handful of novels by American women writers, fromUncle Tom’s CabintoThe House of MirthandBeloved, that make it onto standard reading  lists. But there are hundreds of wonderful books by American women that have been underestimated,  overlooked, or forgotten.Here’s my starting guide to ten extraordinary works of fiction--one from each decade of the  twentieth century--that deserve to be much better known.The Country of Lost Bordersby Mary  Hunter Austin (1909)A moving collection of stories emphasizing the California landscape and the vulnerability of women,  especially Native American  women who were seduced and abandoned by white men in the Wild West. The  memorable final story about a mysterious woman in the desert, “The Walking Woman,” is Austin’s  manifesto of female independence, equality, tenderness, and sorrow.Herlandby Charlotte Perkins Gilman  (1915)Gilman’s clever utopian novel imagines three American men on a scientific expedition who hear tales of  a “strange and terrible Woman Land in the high distance,” and decide to find and invade it. Expecting  to rule over the women, the men are astounded, entranced, and defeated by the resourcefulness of an  all-female society.The Home-Makerby Dorothy Canfield  Fisher (1924)Fisher was a prolific novelist, a judge for the Book of the Month Club, and a pioneer of Montessori  education in the U.S.  She claimed thatThe Home-Makerwas more about children’s rights than  women’s rights, but she empathized with all the members of a middle-class family whose lives are being  destroyed by the straitjacket of maintaining proper male and female roles. When an accident forces the  husband and wife to change places, everyone is much happier. This could be a comic premise--Mr.  Mom--but Fisher treats it with seriousness and psychological insight.The Unpossessedby Tess Slesinger  (1934)Slesinger used her disillusion with the whole cultural spectrum of the 1930s for her sparkling satire  of the New York leftwing editors of a radical magazine. The novel is both a penetrating  autobiographical portrait of the divided woman intellectual of the decade, painfully torn between party  politics and personal emancipation; and a timeless and very funny lampoon of ideologues driven by  vanity, political trendiness, and competition.The Mountain Lionby Jean Stafford  (1947)Stafford was at her best in this powerful coming-of-age novel about a young brother and sister, Ralph  and Molly Fawcett, who spend their summers at their grandfather’s ranch in Colorado. While Ralph is  being initiated into adventurous manhood, Molly is fiercely and tragically  resisting the dull  femininity which lies in store for her.Maud Marthaby Gwendolyn Brooks  (1953)The only novel by the poet Gwendolyn Brooks,Maud Marthatells the story of a poor black Chicago  housewife, in a lyrical form like that of Virginia Woolf’sMrs. Dalloway, but suffused with  anger against racism, war, and the daily small tragedies of black women’s lives. An American classic.We Have Always Lived in the Castleby Shirley Jackson (1962)Long overlooked, Jackson’s masterpiece has been rediscovered in the twenty-first century by writers  from Stephen King and Jonathan Lethem to Joyce Carol Oates. A perfectly constructed and spine-chilling  example of the female gothic, the novel was among the first great stories of the weird girl, part  teenage outcast, part witch, as a dark heroine of American horror.The Shadow Knowsby Diane Johnson  (1974)While Diane Johnson’s novels about Americans in Paris (such asLe Divorce) have been  bestsellers,The Shadow Knowsis my favorite among her books.  Set in Northern California in the  early 1970s, it is about the racial conflict and paranoia of the decade, and, in Johnson’s words,  “about persons on the fringe; they happen to be women, and what happens to them is meant to be  particular to America in the seventies.”Housekeepingby Marilynne Robinson  (1980)In her first novel, Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Robinson traced the lives of three generations of  women in the imaginary Idaho town of Fingerbone, which is surrounded by mountains and next to a dark  lake. The narrator, Ruth, and her sister, Lucille, are passed from one family caregiver to another;  finally, their aunt Sylvie Fisher, a wanderer and transient, comes back to keep house for them. But  Sylvie’s bizarre housekeeping is like something out of a gothic fairy tale, and the sisters find their  separate ways to create their own domestic visions.Mona in the Promised Landby Gish  Jen (1996)Gish Jen  is one of the funniest and most free-wheeling novelists of the multicultural 90s. InMona  in the Promised Land, whose title plays off a long tradition of Jewish-American immigrant writing,  the adolescent Chinese-American heroine Mona Chang is at a new stage of ethnic identity, renaming and  self-creation. In their own enclave, she and her high school friends exchange food, music, games, and  politics. In the promised land, American girls can change their names, their religions, even re-invent  their nationalities.