SOURCE: "Literary Foremothers and Writers' Silences: Tillie Olsen's Autobiographical Fiction," in Melus, Vol. 12, No. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 55-72.

In the essay below, Kamel discusses the elements which are common within Olsen's writings.

Ellen Moers observes the consistent and fervent penchant for women writers, themselves rendered invisible by patriarchy, to read other women's writings, even those from whom they were geographically and culturally distanced:

Not loyalty but confidence was the resource that women writers drew from possession of their own tradition. And it was confidence that until very recently could have come from no other source…. The personal give-take of the literary life was closed to them. Without it, they studied with a special closeness the works written by their own sex, and developed a sense of easy, almost rude familiarity with the women who wrote them.

Moers supports this observation with extensive examples of nineteenth-century women writers reading their...