👤 Gender and sexuality

German Women's Writing of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Future Directions in Feminist Criticism
Edited by Helen Fronius and Anna Richards
Legenda (General Series) •26 August 2011

  • ‘The volume will be of great use to students and researchers alike, as a source of well-written critical scholarship and of pointers to severe deficits in current research. It offers productive methodologies for taking the enquiry forward in areas vital to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the place of women writers as part of the whole picture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural history in the German-speaking lands.’ — unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 48.4 (October 2012), 489
  • ‘Thus the book’s structure, like its title, ultimately collapses: the future has not yet happened. Yet it is glimpsed here—and it will indeed necessarily entail killing off and reviving the female author and the female reader, undoing and redoing gender, sexuality, and herstory, embracing pluralism and firing the canon. And it will only have been achieved once the gatekeepers become contributors and all critics—including men—are doing feminist criticism.’ — Robert Gillett, Modern Language Review 109.2, April 2014, 547-48 (full text online)

George Sand and Autobiography
Janet Hiddleston
Research Monographs in French Studies 5•1 October 1999

  • ‘Janet Hiddleston's well-informed, lucid and succinct study, which takes account of Sand's complex, often contradictory self-identity in terms of gender, will undoubtedly make more accessible a text which is all too often approached selectively.’ — Belinda Jack, Times Literary Supplement 14 July, 2000
  • ‘It is in subtle textual analysis that Hiddleston excels, and her studies of Sand's vocabulary, structure, imagery, symbolism and narrative strategies break new ground... Hiddleston offers us a sensitive and nuanced portrait of a complex writer.’ — Nigel Harkness, French Studies LV.1, 2001, 104-5
  • ‘The conclusion, in many respects the most compelling section of the book, offers a fascinating analysis of central image polarities of the autobiography, Paris versus Nohant, the Garden of Eden versus 'a room of one's own'.’ — Keith Wren, Modern Language Review 96.3, 2001, 832-3 (full text online)
  • ‘Solidly researched and engagingly written, Hiddleston's studies provide a valuable point of departure for readers coming to these texts for the first time, and a welcome stimulus to further reflection for those already familiar with them.’ — Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30.3-4, 2002, 417-19)
  • ‘Particular attention is given to Sand's confused and ambivalent attitude to gender, leaving a text in which the contradictions are shown to be largely unresolved.’ — The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies 1999, 168)
  • unsigned notice, Forum for Modern Language Studies 37.3, 2001, 343

Personal Effects: Reading the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff
Sonia Wilson
Research Monographs in French Studies 27•11 February 2010

  • ‘Wilson’s account is fascinating and throws light upon feminist controversy in late nineteenth-century England and the European continent.’ — unsigned review, The Year's Work in English Studies 91, 2012, 724