Katherine Anne Porter is seldom recognized as a feminist, and little known as a literary critic. She was both…. Porter exhibits in her work a well-trained critical intellect which frequently addressed itself, particularly during the early part of her career, to women's rights and women's concerns. Her book reviews from the 1920's provide ample evidence both of her critical abilities and of her commitment to the feminist cause….

These early book reviews illustrate Porter's forthrightness, her liberal spirit, and her witty mastery of English. They trace the formation of her critical tastes and knowledge of her craft…. They warrant attention not because of the works discussed (most of which have long been buried in oblivion), but because they provide a new perspective on the author of "Flowering Judas," "Old Mortality," "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," "Noon Wine," and Ship of Fools. (p. 44)

The subject of women's rights was so important to Katherine Anne Porter that it appears in a great number of her reviews, just as female characters and women's experience predominate in her fiction. Anyone interested in Porter's personal struggle for independence will find her comments on women and feminist issues very significant.

Critics often have overlooked the feminist orientation of Porter's work. William L. Nance has called her art "the art of rejection," a negative and subtly disapproving description of a quality of Porter's fiction and (by implication) her character which, positively phrased, can be called an affirmation of her independence and the rights of all women to self-realization in the face of centuries of oppression. Like countless other feminists of the twenties—like Virginia Woolf, for example, who had not yet published A Room of One's Own when Porter was expressing very similar opinions—Porter was manifestly committed to the cause of women's liberation. Moreover, as female authors have done since the seventeenth century, she expressed the commitment through devotion to her writing.

In content and form, Porter's essays and fiction demonstrate her faith in the written word as the signification of a woman's struggling sense of selfhood. They show her outrage and exasperation with conventional social patterns, especially male-dominated marriage and the creed of domesticity, sexual repression (which she saw as primarily crippling to women), and the pronouncements of self-appointed authorities of both sexes devoted to the status quo. She praises women who resist pressures to curb their nature, assert their opinions, defy parents, take lovers, educate themselves, and have the courage and self-awareness to give shape to their experience in writing. (pp. 44-5)

In sympathizing with … frustrated, maligned, unvalued, struggling, emotionally blocked, and intellectually undernourished women—as well as the rebels, bluestockings, and "viragos" who illustrate some other forms that liberation sometimes can take—Porter often seems to be speaking in a disguised way about herself, about her lone struggle to support herself without ceasing to follow her career as a writer….

Even in reviews unrelated to women, her remarks consistently uphold a belief in human dignity: each individual's right to freedom, education, and self-expression. She hates narrowness, prejudice, humbug, self-serving moralism, pretentiousness, and dullness. She believes in the written words as a natural concomitant of self-knowledge and has repeatedly spoken of her own commitment to her art as the most valued goal of her life. With this as a background, it is inevitable that her views on the question of woman's essential nature, her proper sphere, and her fulfillment, should take a liberal form. And although Katherine Anne Porter is never a polemicist as a writer of fiction, her early reviews show the emergence of her feminist views in print and her preparation for the splendid portraits of women which fill her works. (p. 48)