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Rating: 
Summary: Women writers you will never forget
Review: I read this book for a literature course that included women writers of the past 100 years. I have not forgotten these writers or this book.It is a "handbook" to carry with you to read and read again.The women writers may have been born long ago or in the 20th Century.Their short stories are all valid today. I love this book .I handle it with care.
Kate Chopin, Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf,and more.I never knew how a short story could affect me.Cahill has put together a great collection of women writers.
Rating:
Summary: here's the table of contents
Review: Introduction
Kate Chopin (1851-1904): The Story of an Hour
Edith Wharton (1862-1937): The Other Two
Willa Cather (1873-1947): A Wagner Matinée
Colette (1873-1947): The Secret Woman
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946): Miss Furr and Miss Skeene
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): The New Dress
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923): The Garden Party
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980): Rope
Kay Boyle (1902-1992): Winter Night
Eudora Welty (1909-2001): A Worn Path
Hortense Calisher (1911- ): The Scream on Fifty-Seventh Street
Ann Petry (1911-1997): Like a Winding Sheet
Mary Lavin (1912-1996): In a Café
Tillie Olsen (1913- ): I Stand Here Ironing
Maeve Brennan (1917-1993): The Eldest Child
Carson McCullers (1917-1967): Wunderkind
Doris Lessing (1919- ): To Room Nineteen
Grace Paley (1922- ): An Interest in Life
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964): Revelation
Jean Stubbs (1926- ): Cousin Lewis
Edna O'Brien (1930- ): A Journey
Alice Munro (1931- ): The Office
Joyce Carol Oates (1938- ): In the Region of Ice
Margaret Drabble (1939- ): The Gifts of War
Julie Hayden (1939-1981): Day-Old Baby Rats
Alice Walker (1944- ): Everyday UseBibliography
Rating:
Summary: "What the heart is ... and what it feels."
Review: The original edition of this anthology was published in
1975 by the New American Library, under the same title.
This volume contains 26 short stories written by women,
and arranged in chronological order by the authors'
birthdates. Kate Chopin (1851-1904) appears first with
her magnificent, ironic short masterpiece "The Story of
an Hour."
The anthology contains a very good "Introduction,"
short biographies (a page or more) of the authors before
their stories, and a Bibliography at the end which lists
the author's major works.
The editor, Susan Cahill, has given the best insight
into the purpose and virtue of this collection in the
"Introduction":
"In each story in this collection an artist expresses
with realistic compassion the consciousness of an
individual woman. To label any of the writers 'feminist'
would be to force that writer into an easy category, to
insist her home is not the house of fiction but a smaller
place. Yet it is no error to see these fictions as
feminism's sacred texts, their authors as the movement's
greatest prophets, for they tell us more about what it
feels like to be a woman than all the gray abstractions
about Women heard on the talk shows or read in gray
reviews about gray books on sexual stereotypes. In a
world whose future may be rationalized by the abstractions
of _realpolitik_, anything that takes us closer to the
heart, that makes us respond seriously and sympathetically
to the individual human being is to be revered. 'In the
end, our technique is sensitivity,' Eudora Welty writes
about the crafting of the short story."
* * * "The twenty-six stories in this book have been
selected because they are extraordinarily moving and
convincing portraits of women and their lives by
extraordinary writers." * * * "...women in the city,
suburb, country, ghetto, working-class Jewish, celibate
Catholic, Irish, English, American Canadian, and a few
secret French women. Women who choose women over men,
women who choose husband over personal fulfillment,
women who know self, women who are too oppressed or
too weak to know or choose anything. The twenty-six
stories in this anthology show that a woman's destiny
is as mysterious and individual and various as the
human personality itself. * * *these fictions ...unfold
a deep understanding of what Stephen Daedalus's mother
in _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ prayed
her son would someday learn: 'What the heart is...and
what it feels."
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