Private Voices, Public Lives ed. by Nancy Owen Nelson (review)

Reviews P rivate Voices, Public L ives. Edited by Nancy Owen N elson. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1995. 319 pages, $16.95.) It is difficult to review a collection of personal essays by women of public achievem ent because their stories are so . . . personal. P rivate Voices, Public Lives brings together twenty-four narratives of change and growth among women who inhabit both the center and the interesting margins of academia. Nancy Owen N elson asked the contributors to describe the connection between texts that they loved and their own life experiences. For the reader, it is like entering a room full of exceptional women such as Susan R osowski, M elody Graulich, and Lynn Z. Bloom , each of whom has taken considerable risks to tell you a private story. The results are expectedly uneven, just as they are in life, for each reader/listener brings her own context to the tale: some essays are im mediately com pelling, others seem not as relevant, but most are worthy of being stored for future sustenance. Particularly felicitous is the discovery of an articulate woman who shares an affinity to one of your favorite books. Among the topics addressed are mothering, divorce, coming out, aging, change of crit­ ical perspective, alterations in career, and new ways of teaching. W hile editor Nancy Owen N elson notes that other collections have covered som e of the same ground, she praises these previous books for opening the door to this exploration. This non-adversarial, non-binary approach to texts, in which one does not have to be either first or best, is the type of fem inist criticism pro­ posed by several of the essayists. A major achievem ent of the book is the multiple ways in which it decon­ structs another binary m inefield, the public/private chasm that women still feel pressured to negotiate. Rather, as contributor Charlotte McClure notes, careful reading of foremothers such as Kate Chopin, Mary Austin, and Gertrude Atherton reveals a lineage of “loving-w orking” women “who express in their own voices the natural capacity of women for public work and private love, for independence and connectedness.” The host of women writers who are loving­ ly mentioned in several essays— Virginia W oolf, T illie Olsen, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Adrienne Rich, Amy Tan— enlarge the number of “contributors” to this book in the personal mode that would have been unimaginable to many essayists twenty years ago. 168 Western American Literature This is not to suggest that P rivate Voices, Public Lives is a painless read about the triumphs of essayists. Poignant accounts of laying aside w om en’s fic­ tion for years in order to pursue a Ph.D. in m asculinist literary criticism , of the excruciating journey of reading one’s self back from estrangements, of the death of a child, make the collection one that should be read chapter by chap­ ter in order to give each essayist her due time. In fact, this reader wished even greater variety among the essayists’ class background and ages, for the very thing I found appealing— book as mirror— at times seem ed self-indulgent. (This privileging of som e w om en’s private experiences is one criticism of the personal essay as now practiced by fem inist academics such as Jane Tompkins, who wrote the foreword to this collection: is such a revealing essay the pre­ rogative of the already-published successful woman?) However, in P rivate Voices, Public Lives., most of the essayists attempt to forge links between women through common experiences and texts-in-com m on. In fact, for traditionally-trained women to delineate the incremental steps that brought them to achievem ent is, as several contributors revealed, the hardest writing some had undertaken. This discomfort results in beautiful prose, “. . .this new possibility of perfect bliss: writing from my whole self,” as Ann Romines puts it. The often gorgeous, com pelling essays that emerge give hope to all academic writers who think there is scholarly writing or cre­ ative writing, another dichotomy that this collection disproves through inspir­ ing example. The evocative writing is som etim es put to unsettling...