Joan Smith
Oprah, Di and Hillary
Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage
By Elaine Showalter
Picador 384pp £16 order from our bookshop
When I was growing up, women did not have role models. Of course, there were famous women from history – Boudicca, Elizabeth I, Marie Curie – but they all seemed impossibly remote. I’m not certain when I heard of Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time, but I’m pretty sure it was after I had discovered The Female Eunuch. What was exciting about Germaine Greer (and Kate Millett, and half a dozen other feminist writers of the early Seventies) was that they were alive and addressing questions that touched my life directly. And I slowly became aware that, far from being a new breed of women who had sprung fully–formed upon an astonished world, they had antecedents stretching back at least two centuries.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad