SOURCE: "Solitude, Work, Humility," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4548, June 1, 1990, p. 586.

Showalter is an American educator, editor, and critic who frequently writes on feminist issues and concerns. In the following mixed review, she discusses Martin's focus on gender differences and Victorian society in Mary Reilly.

When Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde was first published in 1886, its original readers were struck by the maleness of the story: all the characters (except for the young thug, Hyde) are middle-aged bachelors whose sole emotional relationships are with each other. As one of Stevenson's female reviewers observed, "no woman's name occurs in the book, no romance is even suggested in it". Dramatists who have adapted Stevenson's novel for the stage or screen since Thomas Sullivan's first successful melodrama in 1887 have invariably added female characters, usually a "good" woman (a virginal débutante) and a "bad" woman (a barmaid...