From Publishers Weekly
In her introduction, Koppelman ("Two Friends" and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories) explains the source of her personal commitment to this issue: eight and a half years of abuse. She also successfully unites 30 thematically and chronologically diverse pieces to show that domestic violence has a long pedigree. But these stories aren't just history; they are also most definitely literature. In the first chapter of Caroline Kirkland's 1839 epistolary novel, A New Home, Who'll Follow, the narrator devotes a single, powerful sentence to a dangerous innkeeper in recounting her adventures in the Michigan wilderness. Her very offhandedness is chilling. In Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers," a woman's husband has been murdered--she claims that someone slipped a rope around his neck and strangled him while she was asleep in bed beside him--and while the sheriff is puzzled, her sister housewives are not. Jean Wheeler Smith's "That She Would Dance No More" is the chilling tale of a man who seduces a young woman to dampen her spirits. Andrea Dworkin's "bertha schneiders existential edge" is a jittery recollection of indignities ("anyway, finally 2 events led to my final departure. first I went shopping and he tried to run me over with his car"). Sandra Cisneros's "Minerva Writes Poems" and "Linoleum Roses" are both brief and powerful. Each selection is introduced by a passage or poem about abuse that connects to the story at hand. This is a first-rate collection that illustrates how universal and enduring such violence is.
Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Like Koppelman's earlier anthologies of writing by women (e.g., Women's Friendships, LJ 11/1/91), this volume has a theme: the abuse of women by their husbands and lovers and women's active and varied responses. Including works published from the 1830s to the 1990s, and literary styles and genres from detective fiction to magic realism, the 29 selections show the ubiquity of abuse and its frequent treatment by authors such as Lydia Maria Child, Mary Heaton Vorse, Sandra Cisneros, Beth Brant, and Merrill Joan Gerber. Among the striking number of revenge stories are Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers," featuring two neighbor women hiding evidence that another has killed her husband, and Zora Neale Hurston's "Sweat," about a man who dies by his own instrument of torture. With one exception?there are no depictions of lesbian-lesbian battering?it's hard to think of any group not represented here; and while physical battering predominates, abuse is defined broadly. As Koppelman, a former battered wife, writes in her moving introduction, these stories are "one kind of intervention." An important purchase for public and academic libraries.?Carolynne Myall, Eastern Washington Univ. Libs., Spokane
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
