White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue

Originally published in 1991. The style of this startlingly original appraisal of a broad range of women’s writing suggests a new direction for feminist criticism, combining as it does challenging, intellectual debate and fresh textual analysis with fictional example and autobiographical detail to make a wholly new invention in the field. In addressing the need for the critic to say ‘I’ and to own judgments and statements instead of attributing these to an apparently impersonal third person, the