SOURCE: A review of Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism, 1839–1939, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 17, No. 2, Autumn, 1986, pp. 477–79.

In the following review, Deutsch offers a mixed assessment of Significant Sisters, asserting that Forster is “far more interested in humanizing these women … than in explicating the wider context of feminist history through them.”

If you like romances, chances are you will enjoy reading the engagingly written biographical vignettes that comprise Forster's work. About neither grassroots nor the feminist movement, except indirectly, Significant Sisters reveals the personal trials and tribulations of eight prominent women, five of them born in England, two in the United States, and one in Russia.

Readers seeking either a comparative perspective or new information would be advised to look elsewhere. A novelist and biographer, Forster has read comprehensively in her subjects' published works, much of their correspondence, and some of the recent biographies, but...