SOURCE: "Hidden from History," in New Statesman and Society, February 23, 1996, p. 45, 46.

In the following review, Hopkinson discusses Brink's presentation of "a multiplicity of women's viewpoints" in Imaginings of Sand.

We've had a few centuries to accustom ourselves to women writing as men what they couldn't write as women. Curiously, though, while Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela served as prototypes both of the novel and of women's writing, later male authors have generally shunned female voices. Where men are active and women passive, for a man to adopt a female pseudonym would be as pointless as to make menstruation, childbearing and domestic violence—rather than their supposed counterparts of politics, lovers, independence—the proper subject of male literary creation.

Yet this is what the South African novelist André Brink has done in his fictitious family history as he alternates the choices made by two Afrikaner sisters, Anna and Kristien. It...