Sisterhood of Scribblers

By Le Anne Schreiber

LITERARY WOMEN

by ELLEN MOERS

336 pages. Doubleday. $10.

In her preface to Literary Women, Ellen Moers admits that she once thought "segregating major writers from the general course of literary history simply because of their sex was insulting." Her instincts were right. But trapped in a boondoggle--a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for a book on women writers--Moers betrayed her better judgment. With forced bravado, she tucks three centuries of French, English and American authors between the covers of her book, as if she were playing hostess to a slumber party of pen pals.

The strain of finding a common bond between Erica Jong and Elizabeth Barrett Browning forces Moers into some ingenious critical parlor games. Setting the tone in her opening chapter, ("My tale is one of triumph"), Moers presents a cloying portrait of George Sand as a scribbling SuperMom--prototype of the "efficient, versatile, overworked modern mother." The need to establish distinctly female traditions also leads to unabashed juggling of literary records. It makes no sense for a critic who has written intelligently about Thackeray and Dickens in previous books to claim that illiteracy is "plainly a woman's theme" or that "money and its making were characteristically female rather than male subjects in English fiction."

Yet these excesses are not the whole volume. Whenever Moers stops schematizing long enough to let her consider able critical acumen focus on specific works, she produces fresh, provocative insights into the workings of particular female imaginations. She suggests that Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley at 18, is a grotesque birth myth subliminally inspired by the traumas its author must have suffered as an unwed teen-age mother. Moers also persuasively argues that the gothic novel has its origins in Radcliffe's desire to find a respectably feminine substitute for the male picaresque tradition. The mysterious creaking castles kept her 18th century maidens properly indoors, while providing them with all the alarms and excursions that Smollett's rogues enjoyed. Moer's discussion of Jane Austen and George Eliot as the ying and yang of British class-consciousness is brilliant.

Readable Introduction. Unfortunately, Moers shies away from some of her best insights. A few pages into a promising discussion about the difference between male and female writers' use of sexual imagery, she stops and apologizes for having brought up the subject. An erotic imagination might, be all right for Erica's following, she suggests, but not for her own gentle reader. Similarly, after observing that the four female titans of the modern novel (Willa Gather, Colette, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein) were all somewhat "alarming" women fascinated by the permutations of sexual identity, Moers furiously backpedals. She dismisses as insignificant, for example, the fact that Gather frequently chose male narrators for her novels.

Despite its flaws, Literary Women still serves as an immensely readable introduction to some 60 women writers, including many whose reputations have been entombed in the footnotes of professional journals. For these literary shut-ins, a slumber party is better than no outing at all.

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