Old Maids: Short Stories by Nineteenth Century U.S. Women Writers. Ed. Susan Koppelman (Routledge and Kegan Paul/Pandora Press, New York/London, 1984, $9.95 paper). The Other Woman: Stories of Two Women and a Man. Ed. Susan Koppelman (The Feminist Press, New York, 1984, $8.95 paper). Between Mothers and Daughters: Stories Across a Generation. Ed. Susan Koppelman (The Feminist Press, New York, 1984, $8.95 paper). Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression. Christine Delphy, trans. Diana Leonard (University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. MA, 1984, $10.95 paper).

There's a whole body of women's writing in English that is at once relatively unknown and superbly good if one reads the works in the contexts of their own literary tradition, which is not that of the masculinist canon we all know. Even critics who have created new analytic tools we can apply to women's literature have worked on the relatively narrow base of those (atypical) works that have made it into the masculinist canon. Susan Koppelman has spent fifteen years searching for American women's short stories from 1826 to the present (she found, incidentally, that the short story form was pioneered and developed by women) and from the more than two thousand “minor” or unknown stories she unearthed, most from single-author collections and women's magazines, she has fashioned these three volumes. (Five more have been accepted for publication and fifteen are planned at this time, including a “big book” of 150 stories from 1826 to 1980.)

To my mind, what is so very exciting about Koppelman's research is seeing the characteristic themes of women's writing emerge from the body of the work – they are still characteristic today – and finding how stories that first seem pale or puzzling gather extraordinarily vivid, suggestive force once one reads them in the context of all the works. More, there are geniuses here – Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is only one of them – and subjectmatter never mentioned in traditionally masculinist criticism but whose power we know in our women's bones. For me the map of literature has been altered forever by Koppelman's anthologies.

The books may have been ignored partly because reading the stories without attending to Koppelman's interpretations can be a puzzling business.