Yes Jamie, it's a big aside, but I've read Slipshod Sybils and I liked it a lot. Obviously as a relativist I wouldn't go with GG's judgments about value. But in a way to focus on those judgments misrepresents the point of the book, which was to show a number of common patterns in the careers of women writers e.g. being taken up in their sexy youth, praised and overpraised by male communities-of-judgment, and then promptly forgotten, discredited by having been slavered over. And what the cost of exclusion meant for these writers, in terms of being unadmitted to cultural power-centres (such as knowledge of classics or engagement in politics). I read it about ten years ago, but since then Im much more closely acquainted than I was with writings of Aphra Behn, LEL, Charlotte Smith so perhaps I wouldn't be as impressed as I was then. But at the time it introduced me to patterns of discrimination that I could easily see were still highly important factors in how men, including myself, tended to respond to women poets.
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