Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female Authorship

Not In Sisterhood investigates an important transitional moment in the history of U.S. women's writing: the uneasy shift from the 19th-century model of the "lady author" to some new but undefined alternative. The careers of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, together with that of their friend and peer Zona Gale, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, reveal several different strategies for negotiating this unknown terrain. While Gale made her feminist politics an integral part of her successful novels and plays, Wharton and Cather publicly denied any interest in gender issues or social reforms. Not in Sisterhood shows how the complex intersections of literary and social politics that shaped the world of Wharton, Cather, and Gale are still at work in today's feminist reconstructions of literary history.

Author: D. Williams
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 06/20/2001
Pages: 225
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.51w x 0.56d
ISBN: 9780312229214

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2001 pg. 688
Reference and Research Bk News 11/01/2001 pg. 233

About the Author
DEBORAH LINDSAY WILLIAMS is Associate Professor of English at Iona College in New York, where she teaches U.S. literature and Women's Studies.