SOURCE: Hooker, Navina Krishna. Review of Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing, by Elaine Showalter. Review of English Studies 45, no. 178 (May 1994): 288-90.

In the following review, Hooker commends the variety of questions that Showalter raises in Sister's Choice, but notes minor flaws in Showalter's “untimely polemics.”

Elaine Showalter's Sister's Choice grapples with the problem of first identifying and then adequately describing a philosophical and aesthetic framework that links the work of major American women writers from Fuller onwards. The question is an important and challenging one, for it addresses a key problem of feminist literary theory, and has rightly attracted much recent critical attention. As Showalter states on the first page of her book, ‘Could women … ever hope to have a criticism of their own?’, given that the linguistic tools at their disposal are the same ones handed down to them by their male literary...