Literary Sisterhoods: Imagining Women Artists

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

Deborah Heller is a well-respected Canadian scholar who works out of
York University. In Literary Sisterhoods, she has taken literary
criticism in a most interesting direction. She has selected five female
novelists whose own backgrounds span various cultural and temporal
landscapes, and identified key female artists who figure largely as
protagonists in their writings. Unexpected connections between
characters begin to emerge, as do their similar paths as they progress
through the course of each novel. Heller’s method has, in fact,
isolated enough correlations to constitute a literary tradition, and one
that has not received much attention until now.

Heller also highlights the relationship of artistic protagonists to
their authors’ works. In one of Alice Munro’s short stories, for
example, a protagonist reflects on the meaning of a “loose woman”:
“When he’d heard people say that, he always thought of an unbuttoned
blouse, clothes slipping off the body, to indicate its appetite and
availability. Now he thought that it could mean just that—loose. A
woman who could get loose, who wasn’t fastened down, who was not
reliable, who could get away.” Munro writes frequently of women and
their struggles to get loose from the constraints of society, but
perhaps surprisingly, these women also manage to get loose from the
constraints of fiction. They behave in unexpected ways and reject the
confines of closure, creating the open-ended conclusions so often found
in Munro’s stories.

Literary Sisterhoods has made a valuable contribution to contemporary
literary criticism.