Content area
Full Text
By Deborah Lindsay Williams. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 225 pp. $40.00.
Why Zona Gale -- a Pulitzer-prize winning writer whose novels were both a critical and popular success, a woman of immense popularity and social influence who was, at one time, known as "the most ambitious girl in New York" (66) -- has fallen so far out of the realm of feminist literary studies and the United States canon of literature produced between 1910 and 1940 is the complex and fascinating subject of Deborah Lindsay Williams's book, Not in Sisterhood. Rather than a focused monograph on Gale's literary productions and life, however, Williams adopts an ambitious tripartite scheme of analysis, positioning Gale in relationship to two women writers whose place in the American canon seems now well assured, Willa Cather and Edith Wharton. The primary subject of this book is why Cather and Wharton remained in the canon while Gale vanished into obscurity, despite their many similarities (all were successful businesswomen who cannily marketed their own fictions, recipients of prestigious literary awards, and popular successes). Williams's argument, spanning correspondence between and among these three writers, and including deft interpretations of their fictional productions as well as trenchant analyses of gender politics in both contemporary reviews and in the tenets of literary modernism and critical discourse, ultimately concludes that Gale's embrace (and Wharton's and Cather's explicit rejection) of "literary sisterhood" accounts for the disparity in their...