Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction ed. by Glenwood Irons (review)

160 LEITERS IN CANADA 1996 magazine or Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Women of colour, by contrast~ point to work such as This Bridge Called My Back and Making Face, Making Soul, landmark American anthologies of political writing by Black, Latina, Asian, and Native feminists. No single definition of feminism emerges from these accounts. Some women see feminism in conventional individual terms, as permission to have a career and experience the world, while others such as Pamela Dos Ramos insist that feminism must be about working together for the freedom of all women, not just the most privileged . Along the way, women talk about how their experience of motherhood , thebody,housework, work, racism, violence, friendship/spirituality, family, and sexuality has forged their feminism. Bringing It Home is geared to a popular audience, and this is one of its strengths. It will appeal to readers new to feminism or those interested in the shaping of popular feminism. Those searching for more critical analytical essays they can use in the classroom or for popular education will be disappointed. The book's epigraph is from a recent essay by the American radical feminist Mary Daly, in which she speaks of the need for women to 'share our experiences' in order to chart future directions. However, as many activists and theorists in the women's movement have discovered, 'sharing our experiences/ while a central component of feministpractice, is simplynot enough. The diversity ofthatexperienceand the material differences among womenmean that such sharingprovides no magic road to feminist strategy. We also need some analysis, as Canadian feminist theorists such asDorothySmithand Himani Bannerjihave argued, about how our experience is produced and how it is linked with the structures of power in our society. (CYNTHIA WRIGHT) Glenwood Irons, editor. Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction University of Toronto Press 1995. xxiv, 192. $50.00 cloth, $20.95 paper Although nobody says so in this uneven collection of essays by diverse hands, women are as important in the detective story as they are in the history of the English novel itself. I don't think that P.O. James made this connection when she told my eighteenth-century fiction students that all' novels are detective stories, but I imagine that she would have got round to the observation if they had had time to question her. The range of writers, central characters, and tones is wide in the works addressed, from the tough-talking heroines of Marcie Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky to the elegance of Carolyn Heilbrun's Kate Fansler, the spinsterly shrewdness of Miss Marple and the interestingly solitary figure of Nancy Drew. One of my friends says that Nancy was a heroine for her because she owned her own car, the way teenage boys did, nearly never teenage girls. HUMANITIES 161 Bobbie Arm Mason catches the centre of Carolyn Keene's fantasy world when she labels Nancy ''The Once and Future Prom Queen,' hinting at the power of the car transmuted to Excalibur in the lady whose mother is absent from the scene. Dorothy Sayers, surveyed in SueEllen Campbell's paper, is more conventional in her representation of women. Harriet Vane is ahead of her time with a lover and a career, but Lord Peter sorts out the villain in Gaudy Night. This villain, Annie, is, predictably, not one of the dons, but a semi-literate scout, who taWlts able undergraduates into the river and nearly finishes off Harriet and the member of the seR who has, with true scholarly honesty, occasioned the suicide of Annie's scholarly husband. Lord Peter's portrait now hangs in the Buttery of his old college, but Harriet, easily rendered from the details of Busman's Honeymoon, has no memorial. Somerville was not happy with Sayers's representation of life in the fictional female college she sited on the Master's field of Wimsey's. And nobodyis really entirelyhappywith what happens to women when they take a central role in that world where the weapons belong to the opposite sex. Is detecting, in the phrase most often recalled mthe volume, a suitable job for a woman? Are women who detect less womanly (like the dons of Gaudy Night...