SOURCE: Alexander, Flora. Review of Stories, Theories, and Things, by Christine Brooke-Rose. Review of English Studies 44, no. 174 (May 1993): 301-03.

In the following review, Alexander offers a positive assessment of Stories, Theories, and Things, calling the collection intelligent, clear-sighted, and “a rich store of wisdom.”

It is curious that the teaching of courses and the writing of books on women's writing can provoke hostile reactions, whereas similar activities dealing with, for example, Irish writing, or Canadian literature, do not. The basis for the disapproval of women's writing as a subject, when it is not simple misogyny, is often a sincerely held belief that women's experience is not sufficiently distinct from that of men to make women's writing an appropriate object of attention. Yet society does treat women differently from men, and for most women, at least until very recently, being female has imposed some degree of limitation on their...