What Did Miss Darrington See?: An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction - Hardcover

Salmonson, Jessica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558610057 ISBN 13: 9781558610057

Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1989

Synopsis

Book by Salmonson, Jessica

About this title

Review

According to Salmonson, for the last two hundred years, though women were the primary writers (and, therefore, developers) of supernatural fiction-a category that includes but is not limited to horror-support from the male-dominated publishing world has been almost exclusively for work written by males. As evidence, the period and current anthologies referenced contain between zero and ten percent female contributors. Salmonson's secondary thesis, that women used this medium to sustain and transmit feminist traditions, is regrettably not given enough space and attention to be proven. On the other hand, the thesis of Jackson's introduction, which is that only feminist writers were able to interject sensitivity into a supernatural story, is blatantly false. The authors were selected for their feminist activities, the stories for their literary quality. Salmonson has provided a note before each story to introduce the author: a necessary action for those authors whose work has gone out of print. The stories are all of high quality; the older ones are period, but not dated. The dates of publication range Erom 1850 through 1988. Modem authors with recognizable, award-winning names from the science-fiction field include Joanna Russ, Phyllis Eisenstein, and Lisa Tuttle. Salmonson never explains her choice of an order for the stories, but it works well. I would have placed the introduction as an afterword, however, and I strongly recommend reading it after the stories. This suggestion is due neither to Jackson's thesis nor to her warping the stories to make them present a single, supporting viewpoint~ but rather to her revealing plot elements, thus diminishing most of the stories when they are encountered later. This book is an excellent source of new-to-the-reader supernatural stories, and it also provides many thought-provoking ideas on the changing status of feminist creative writings. -- From Independent Publisher

From Publishers Weekly

A woman bumps into her imaginary childhood companion at the airport; telepathy bridges the 5000 miles and a generation gap that separate a rural German housewife and a Chicago college student; an overweight black girl soars to freedom in her dreams; a conservative Edwardian woman is urged to marry by her future daughter, a flapper; the Virgin Mary invites the caresses of a black man; a hyena tries to pass as a debutante; a middle-aged professional meets, and learns to accept and cherish, the needy child within her. Salmonson, a seasoned writer and anthologist of fantasy and the supernatural, gathers 24 stories, written between 1850 and 1988, by U.S., English and Latin American women. While occasionally archaic or conventional in format, the selections are a superb introduction to the vast, often obscured supernatural genre in its varied permutations: Gothic romance, ghost story, allegory, etc. This searching documentation of female alienation and suppression persuasively demonstrates how supernatural fiction intentionally subverts patriarchal notions, and links the literature to the constancy of feminist social and political struggle.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 1558610057
• ISBN 13: 9781558610057
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 263