SOURCE: Fraiman, Susan. Review of Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle, by Elaine Showalter. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 12, no. 1 (spring 1993): 119-22.

In the following excerpt, Fraiman praises Sexual Anarchy for its “gripping” examination of such works as Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Ann Ardis's New Women, New Novels.

At the center of Elaine Showalter's gripping study of the fin de siècle is a reading of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I cannot help appropriating this duo to figure the relation between Ann Ardis's upbeat, brightly lit New Women, New Novels and Showalter's own darker and more disconcerting work. True that, in their attention to proto-modern texts by men as well as women and in their historicizing ways, both books represent a second phase of American feminist criticism, beyond its earliest thematic...