The Oxford Book of Women's Writings in the United States.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

edited by Linda Wagner-Martin and Cathy N. Davidson / Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 596, $30.00

Reviewed by STEVEN G. KELLMAN Literary Scene Editor, USA Today, and Professor of Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Less than 30 years ago, Kate Chopin's The Awakening was out of print. Today, it is the literary text most widely taught in American universities. The most dramatic change in literary studies in the past three decades has been the vastly enlarged representation of females as authors, teachers, students, and readers.

Because the history of women's writing has been meticulously inventoried and explicated, The Oxford Book of Women's Writing can afford to be particular. Unlike the editors of, for example, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, Linda Wagner-Martin and Cathy N. Davidson do not aim to be either canonical or scholarly Their volume assembles selections by almost 100 authors as well as useful notes. It also achieves their announced objective: "a book that, relieved of an obligation to be comprehensive, readers could simply enjoy" without necessarily accepting its editors hyperbolic claim that "the best U.S. women's writing is, quite simply some of the best writing in the world." Wagner-Martin and Davidson offer no one quite as good as Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, ortolstoy.

The anthology omits such formidable figures as Anne Dillard, Joan Didion, Ellen Glasgow, Pauline Kael, Maxine Hong Kingston, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Bharati Mukherjee, Grace Paley, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Anne Porter, Anne Sexton, Jane Smiley, Susan Sontag, Jezin Stafford, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher...