Review of Coming Out From Under: Contemporary Australian Women Writers by Pam Gilbert

Abstract

This is a timely and welcome addition to the current wave of books on Australian women writers. It demonstrates the range, diversity and power of contemporary women's writings and examines the preoccupations of ten selected authors. Gilbert sees these preoccupations as not only thematic—the 'complexities of family relationships', the 'effect of gender restrictions on women' and the 'construction of female sexuality'; but also tonal ('irony and anger') and textual (the challenge to the 'tyranny of discourse and gender' and the 'interrogation of a seemingly natural language system'). If these phrases from the Introduction seem abstract and bland— such abstractions do tend to lose their power through detachment from experience— this is definitely not so of the literature which Gilbert goes on to discuss.