SOURCE: Colby, Vineta. Review of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, by Elaine Showalter. Modern Philology 77, no. 3 (February 1980): 357-60.

In the following review, Colby praises the range of material covered in A Literature of Their Own, but criticizes Showalter's assertions about Victorian feminism and her analysis of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot.

A Literature of Their Own is by far the best account yet published of the emergence of the feminine sensibility in the English novel. It documents with sound research and reasoned, if sometimes controversial, theory a subject that too many writers in recent years have exploited irresponsibly, with too little reading and too much hasty prejudgment. Elaine Showalter rides no hobbyhorses after fashionable trends in psychology or sociology, and it is refreshing to find in her index no entry for Herbert Marcuse or Norman O. Brown, and only passing references...