Women Writing About Men.

Examines the way women novelists, such as Austen, Bronte, Eliot, Woolf, West, Lessing, and Walker, portray men as brothers, fathers, sons, gentlemen, and bullies

Noting that most feminist discussion of women's novels has concentrated on the female characters in them, British academic Miller presents a carefully organized reading of the husbands, fathers, brothers and sons presented in the works of some important women novelists from the early 19th century to the present. The author maintains that the portrayal of men in the works of writers from Charlotte Bronte to Alice Walker presents an outsider's view of society so discrete thatMiller claimswomen writers make use of a cultural bilingualism in creating their novels. Readers sympathetic to this thesis will enjoy the telling quotations and feminist insights even though following the sometimes heavy-handed critiques of a woman writing about women writing about men can be a labored task.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Miller's theory is that women, as cultural outsiders, have developed a special language for writing about men, "a learned androgyny" shared by women readers; thus male characters in women's writing are "but men seen from a woman's perspective." In addition, tracing her premise through Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson, she finds a growing awareness of women's ambiguous roles. Finally, from her own work with bilingual students, she examines the language of minority women writers, such as Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Tillie Olson, who still write as aliens in our culture. Though her initial concept is exciting, Miller's exposition is muddy, requiring both wide reading and a tolerance for academic prose. For specialized collections. Shelley Cox, Special Collections, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib . , Carbondale
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.