Women's lives : the view from the threshold / Carolyn G. Heilbrun.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Heilbrun looks at the biographies and memoirs of great women and reveals the ways in which feminism has changed our perceptions of their lives.

Electronic Format Disclaimer: Excerpt from the poem "Where Did I Leave Off" by Virginia Hamilton Adair on pages 65-66 removed at the request of the rights holder

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

As a biographer of Gloria Steinem (The Education of a Woman, 1995), as author of several books of powerful feminist literary criticism, and in her role as detective novelist Amanda Cross, Heilbrun (Columbia Univ.) could not have been bettered as the choice to give the annual Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto. In these direct and engaging lectures one can hear Heilbrun's firm speaking voice--and her pride in how much feminist criticism has contributed to literary study as well as her recognition that women still find themselves in a state of what she calls "liminality." The term refers to women in a state of transition: they seem constantly on the threshold, entering a new stage of awareness that makes them more forceful literary voices than earlier women writers could have imagined--and yet women never seem to arrive at the moment of fulfillment in Heilbrun's account of literary history. Occasionally Heilbrun stumbles into academic jargon: "Let me pause here to make a quite irrelevant and yet to me significant point about the liminality of current professional female nomenclature." Nevertheless, this book remains remarkably accessible to students and scholars at all levels of academic study. C. Rollyson; Bernard M. Baruch College, CUNY