SOURCE: Chew, Martha. “Rita Mae Brown: Feminist Theorist and Southern Novelist.” In Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, pp. 195-213. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984.

In the following essay, Chew presents an overview of Rita Mae Brown's novels and essays, focusing on her political consciousness and her treatment of social class and categories in her novels.

Rita Mae Brown is known both for her political writing, which consists of the essays that came out of her activism as a lesbian feminist in the late sixties and early seventies and were collected in A Plain Brown Rapper (1976); and for her fiction, which to date consists of five novels, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), In Her Day (1976), Six of One (1978), Southern Discomfort (1982), and Sudden Death (1983). Although the two bodies of work overlap chronologically, they come out of essentially different periods in Brown's life, and the novels have been...