SOURCE: "Women's Intimations," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 19, 1990, pp. 1, 5.

Freeman is an American novelist and critic. In the following essay, she provides a positive assessment of The Woman Lit by Fireflies.

Having now published six novels, seven books of poetry and two collections of novellas, Jim Harrison has reached a wonderful place in his writing. There was always great strength to his novels and stories, a compelling sense of movement and character, prose marked by clarity and beautifully eclectic erudition, ribaldry and humor. Set in the West and Midwest, his stories feature rebel characters, outsiders living close to nature, dissolute in their appetite for alcohol and women but guided by a strong conscience and a penchant for honesty.

With his last two books, something else has graced the work, a tender, almost androgynous understanding of the human condition, which allows him to write convincingly in either...