Kat McAdaragh

A Review of Elaine Showalter’s Feminist Classic, A Literature of Their Own

There are books that teach you something new, and then there are books that help you remember what you’ve always felt but didn’t have the words for. Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own is that book.

This groundbreaking feminist novel was first published in 1977. It traces the evolution of British women novelists from the Brontës to Doris Lessing. But it’s more than just a historical survey of the time—it’s a reclamation. It’s an uncovering of voices that were once overlooked, diminished, or completely forgotten about. And for women who read, write, or simply care about the integrity of our cultural memory, it still feels revolutionary nearly fifty years later.

A Hidden Tradition Brought to Life

Showalter asks us the famous question: “Is there a female literary tradition? It’s not rhetorical at all. Throughout the 300-plus pages, she answers it with clarity.

She uncovered a winding line, evolving the arc of resistance and reinvention. She breaks this tradition into three phases:

• The Feminine Phase (1840-1880), when women wrote under male pseudonyms and mimicked male literary form, voices, and traditions.
• The Feminist Phase (1880-1920), marked by protests, awareness, and challenges to patriarchal norms.
• The Female Phase (1920-present), when women began writing from a place of self-definition, identity, and interiority.

As a framework, it’s still one of the most referenced in feminist literary studies. But what struck me the most was how deeply personal it felt. This is not a distant history, it’s our inheritance.

“Their works have been a literature of their own—not just because they were women, but because of the particular circumstances of their lives.”

What We’ve Inherited

What I like the most about Showalter’s work is how she brings lesser-known writers to the forefront, like Mary Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, and May Sinclair. These are not names that are typically brought up in required reading lists. And yet, they were women who worked, published, and shaped the literary culture, only to be forgotten.

I’ve felt the weight of the invisibility, both as a writer and a reader. Women have always written. What we haven’t always had was the power to preserve the words, or to be taken seriously when we dared to center ourselves in them. A Literature of Their Own reminds us that the exclusion of women’s voices wasn’t accidental; it was systemic.

Why It’s Still Relevant

In an era where we are once again reexamining who gets to be included in the canon—who gets to be quoted, who gets to be taught, and who gets to be remembered— A Literature of Their Own is painfully relevant.

Showalter writes,

“One of the great advantages of feminist criticism is that it can understand the context in which women wrote.”

That line has stayed with me and is now included on my post-it note wall. Because context is everything. You cannot separate a woman’s voice from the constraints she had to write within. And you cannot fully celebrate her work without also battling with the cultural forces that tried to silence her.

This novel isn’t just for scholars. I recommend it for anyone who has ever wondered where the women were in the stories that were told. It’s for anyone who’s ever written in silence and wanted to believe that their voice mattered.

Elaine Showalter gave us a blueprint. And if you follow it, you’ll find not only a history of women’s writing, but a community of voices reminding you that your voice matters and you belong here too.

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