SOURCE: Maitland, Sara. “The Way They Were Then, Too.” Spectator 266, no. 8491 (6 April 1991): 28.

In the following review of Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle, Maitland finds shortcomings in Showalter's emphasis on popular male, rather than female, writers and her premature effort to draw parallels between the 1890s and the 1990s.

I am a fan of Elaine Showalter's, and have been since A Literature of Their Own—a study of women writers, particularly novelists, through the 19th century up until the creation of the present phase of the Women's Liberation Movement. I am a fan because she seems to have read everything and her readings are solid responses to actual novels based within feminist theory and within a historical social reality. Moreover, she writes about books so that you want to read them too.

In all these senses Sexual Anarchy does not disappoint. Showalter suggests a neatly...