Adrienne Rich's prose moves with force, clarity, energy; and soothes with a poet's grace and elegance. The only bad prose in ["On Lies, Secrets, and Silence"] is its title, which conveys a wholly inaccurate idea of whining and whimpering within. Feminism, pedagogy and literature, not lies, secrets and silence, are the subjects covered by her essays. The literary studies are brilliant: on Anne Bradstreet, on "Jane Eyre" and on Emily Dickinson, about whom Adrienne Rich may have written the single best critical essay we have….

On feminist issues, which loom largest here and affect all her subjects, Adrienne Rich says much that we have heard before from others; but she usually says it better. Feminist readers, who may feel they need not read another word on women's issues, will find themselves mining this collection for quotable epigrams….

For the purpose of scholars, Adrienne Rich's most important feminist subject is lesbianism, because female homosexuality (of capital importance to modernism in the arts) has a slim bibliography, to which she unfortunately contributes only a few scattered pages here….

Antifeminist readers, who do not understand what "patriarchal society" means, can learn a lot from the critical use of the concept Adrienne Rich makes in her studies of Brontë and Dickinson…. In "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson," it is with the authority of a woman poet that Adrienne Rich discerns will, power and freedom in Dickinson's poems, many of which "seem to me a poet's poems—that is, they are about the poet's relationship to her own power, which is exteriorized in masculine form, much as masculine poets have invoked the female Muse." (p. 1)

The generosity with which Adrienne Rich has given herself to feminist causes in the last decade has made this collection out-of-date in one odd way, even though most of its essays were written in the late 1970's. She seems not to have had time to acknowledge and enjoy the accomplishments of the feminist movement. (p. 29)