SOURCE: "A Feminist Approach to Patricia Highsmith's Fiction," in American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, edited by Brian Docherty, St. Martin's, 1990, pp. 107-19.

In the following essay, Evans relates Highsmith's exploration of the unconscious in her novels and short stories to feminist critical theories.

A critical examination of the work of Patricia Highsmith from a feminist standpoint unavoidably presents a number of challenges, the first being the difficulty of ascertaining precisely to what genre her novels belong. To see her as a 'crime writer' would be inaccurate as well as limitative, since it would mean ignoring certain elements of her stories which are outside the usual crime-detection-arrest pattern. To call her a mystery writer may be more accurate, since she was once awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll by the Mystery Writers of America, yet the nature of mystery in her novels differs greatly from...