Choice 评论

Etherington-Wright (Univ. of Portsmouth, UK) states her purpose in the opening pages: she "propose[s] to offer a fresh analysis of the ways in which women writers during the period 1900-1920, in different professions, present aspects of their lives." To accomplish this end, the author scoured biographical dictionaries and countless other sources, identified 90 British women's autobiographies, and from these chose a representative selection of headmistresses, doctors, nurses, artists, and writers whose life stories she analyzes by profession in part 1. In part 2, Etherington-Wright returns to these autobiographies, reading them in terms of memory, identity, silences, and para-textual material. Of particular note are the introduction, which provides a historiography of critical approaches to women's autobiography, and the chapter titled "Women Doctors," in which the author traces the physicians' intertextual appropriation of fairy tales and other childhood reading in their adult autobiographies. Etherington-Wright claims to use "a bricolage of theories," but in fact the deployment of theoretical frameworks is rather sparse and haphazard. The lack of a bibliography is also disappointing. Summing Up: Optional. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. E. R. Baer Gustavus Adolphus College