[In the following review, Cahill praises the range and the scope of material in A Literature of Their Own, noting that the work “change the content and perspective of literary history as it is currently taught in our colleges and universities.”]

The truly significant accomplishment of A Literature of Their Own is the creation of a new perceptual framework, an accurate and systematic literary history for women writers in the British tradition. In the most comprehensive and convincing study to date, Showalter has extended a radically new awareness of the evolution of a female literary tradition. In 1869 John Stuart Mill argued that if women lived in a different country from men and had never read any of their writings, they would have a literature of their own. To many observers—past and present—it seemed that the besetting sin of women was to write as men write. In contradiction to Mill, Showalter argues that many readers of the novel over the past two centuries have had the indistinct but persistent impression of a unifying voice in women's literature. This distinctive female identity in art has been obscured by a “residual Great Traditionalism,” which has reduced and condensed the extraordinary range and diversity of English women writers to a tiny band of the “great”: Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Through the focus upon these happy few, the links in the chain that bound one generation to the next have been lost.

The purpose of A Literature of Their Own is an effort to describe the female literary tradition in the English novel from the generation of the Brontës to the present day and to show how the development of this tradition is similar to the development of any literary subculture. In constructing the thesis, Showalter views the process of the female subculture as evolving in three phases: imitation, protest and self-discovery—a final turning inward freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity. Showalter calls her stages Feminine, Feminist and Female. These categories are not rigid periods with distinct shifts in values, and the author is respectful of the many overlapping elements. Feminine, feminist or female, the woman's novel has always had to struggle against the cultural and historical forces that relegated women's experience to the second rank; but despite prejudice, despite guilt, despite inhibition, women began to write. Through the power of accurate scholarship and detail Showalter gives the reader a new and informed sense of the strength of purpose which possessed the female writer. She has dramatically rendered the sense of continuity which sustained a unique tradition and which produced a powerful segment of literary awareness.

In the most original chapters of the book—“The Female Aesthetic” and “Flight into Androgyny”—Showalter explores the distinction between consciousness and experience, an important determinant of the direction of modernist women's writing. In this analysis her critical judgment of Virginia Woolf may be severely contested, since she ultimately sees Woolf as elevating passivity into a creed: “Refined to its essences, abstracted from its physicality and anger, denied any action, Woolf's vision of womanhood is as deadly as it is disembodied.”

Obviously, no brief review can be just to the complexity and significance of this excellent study of the female tradition. One of its immediate effects will be to change the content and perspective of literary history as it is currently taught in our colleges and universities. A Literature of Their Own begins to record new choices in a new literary history.