On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. Adrienne Rich (Norton, 310pp., $13.95)

Adrienne Rich notes dryly that “the first verbal attack, slung at the woman who demonstrates a primary loyalty to herself and other women is manhater.” After the bad reviews of her previous prose work, Of Woman Born, Rich might well have extended “the invitation to men” (in Mary Daly's phrase), whether sincerely or not, out of simple self-preservation. Instead On Lies, Secrets, and Silence continues to offer its primary loyalties to women. The author also refuses to allow her very real compassion for men (which an astute reader will not miss) to defuse her conclusions, nor does she parade evidence of her “humanism” (a word Rich has elsewhere said she finds false and will no longer use).

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence can be seen as one woman's journey past obligatory “humanism” (early in the book Rich quotes Virginia Woolf's constant sense that male critics are her audience; “I hear them even as I write,” Woolf says), to the position of a woman who does not give a damn about such voices because she is talking to women. (Robin Morgan's feminist essays in the recent Going Too Far chronicle the same change and comment explicitly on it.) The shift occurs halfway through the book, in 1974. The earlier Rich is capable of assuming (in “The Antifeminist Woman”) that equal pay is “serious” and housework trivial; the later Rich, freed from attending to the voices that so tormented Woolf, can state, “it is the realities civilization has told (women) are unimportant, regressive, or unspeakable which prove our most essential resources.”

Not a popular stand. But its uncompromising honesty frees her for some fine things, from the bitter accuracy of “Toward a Woman-centered University” to the splendid “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson” (a title taken from one of Dickinson's poems). At her best Rich is inimitable: driving through the sentimental legend of Dickinson (Rich points to examples like Ransom and MacLeish's comments on her, and the recent play, The Belle of Amherst) to the truth: Dickinson's three words to her niece (locking the door of her bedroom with an imaginary key), “Matty: here's freedom.”