Feminine sense in Southern memoir : Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter, and Hurston /

This excellent study of a handful of southern authors of the US grew out of Brantley's early reading of Carson McCullers's self-writing, while he was enrolled in an undergraduate course in southern literature in the mid 1970s. His interest expanded in time to include Lillian Smith, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Zora Neale Hurston--not to mention the nature of self-writing itself. Brantley (Middle Tennessee State Univ.) has discovered that a thread of individualism, liberalism, radical thought, and independent speculation binds these modern southern women together, though they have few real ties--other than "dotted lines." Different races, backgrounds, religions, and lives are reflected in this remarkable study of their published and unpublished self-reflective pieces. The author, realizing that women have long been silenced by academic scholars, who have blithely written them out of intellectual history, leaving them to seem "voiceless and passive," makes a powerful plea to "enlarge the Southern mansion to make room" for more women--most especially these. His careful and thoughtful use of intertextual studies provides subtle and balanced insights, which he teases out of individual writings, silences, ironies, and contrasts. The book should prove an invaluable spur toward a reconsideration of the southern canon. Advanced undergraduate; graduate; faculty. N. Tischler; Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus