Book Review: A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter

The ghosts of women writers haunt the landscape of American literature; intentionally silenced, forgotten, they have been awakened once more. The souls of best selling author Catharine Sedgwick (1789-1867), and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Susan Glaspell (Trifles 1916) had been left to wander eternity in unrest, the grave markers of their achievements removed from the literary boneyard. Under Elaine Showalter's quickening, their spirits have finally been laid to rest forever. They have once again taken their right place amongst such celebrated contemporaries as Gertrude Stein, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

There are few books on the role of women in writing that can compare to the masterful collection that Elaine Showalter has created. In her introduction she states "Although I am aware that literary judgments are subjective, and that they reflect critical tastes and temporal values rather than establish eternal and unchanging monuments of excellence, I still believe that such judgments are part of the ongoing arguments of a culture which need to be shared and made public." The result of that bold statement is A Jury of Her Peers (named in deference to Susan Glaspell's 1917 groundbreaking true crime article). Not a catalog nor an encyclopedia of writers, Jury is a biography of sorts. It is the biography of that great American writer known as woman. Her many names, faces and ethnicities. Her accomplishments, her misdeeds against others of her kind and the secret lives she has led in order to survive in a world where she was not always wanted.

In A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, Elaine Showalter explores women writers by generation, focusing on the obstacles that had to be overcome, as well as the triumphs that changed the place of women, not only in literature, but in the overall scheme of intellectual society. From the Nobel Prize winners and most beloved writers in American literature, to those whose names have been intentionally erased from the literary landscape, Showalter reveals their contributions in facing down, and finally breaking down, the patriarchal guard.

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