It is hard to think of anyone better placed to write the first comprehensive history of American women's literature than Elaine Showalter. One of the founders of feminist literary criticism in America and Princeton University's former professor of English literature, she mixes academic respect with the common touch; she has been a television critic for People magazine and has a passion for campus novels, both serious and satirical.rnMs Showalter's 18 previous academic works include "A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing", which came out in 1977 and has since become a classic. Now, turning her attention to her own native tradition, she has produced a magisterially wide-ranging survey, which stretches from the time of the Pilgrim Fathers to the present.rnHer new book is named after a short story by Susan Gaspell, published in 1917, about a sensational murder trial. A downtrodden farmer's wife from Iowa is accused of murdering her husband. While the sheriff's men miss the proof of her guilt, their more perceptive wives immediately spot what has actually been going on in the bleak farmhouse. Concluding that the wife was driven mad by domestic abuse, they plot to make absolutely sure of her acquittal by secretly destroying the evidence: the patriarchal legal system, they believe, is not fit to judge a woman.
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