Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!jarthur!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!aero!nadel
From: nadel@aerospace.aero.org (Miriam H. Nadel)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: great books?
Message-ID: <1990Mar11.174930.1148@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 11 Mar 90 17:49:30 GMT
References: <1263@male.EBay.Sun.COM> <10965@june.cs.washington.edu>
Reply-To: twinsun!athena.mit.edu!erspert (Ellen R. Spertus)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 33
Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 1216
Status: R


I'm new to the group, so forgive me if I repeat anything that anyone's
already said.

Last semester, I took a course "Women in Literature."  The previous
year that it was taught, either none or one of the books were written
by women, but this year, all of the books were.  The professor (Ruth
Perry) and all of the students were female, which was unprecedented in
my experience.  In one of my other classes, I was the only female.  I
loved a number of the books we read.  In my opinion, the best were:

	_Their Eyes were Watching God_ by Zora Neale Hurston
	_The Street_ by Alice Walker (?)
	_Middlemarch_ by George Eliot 

The first two of these are by and about black women.  I was amazed
that nobody had ever pointed such wonderful books out to me before.
I hadn't believed that great stories written by blacks or women
were delegated to the sidelines (i.e. only in classes on women's
literature or Afro-American literature), but I do now.  

Other very good books we read were:

	_The Awakening_ by Kate Chopin
	_Summer_ by ???

Books I didn't particularly like but that others loved were:

	_To the Lighthouse_ by Virginia Woolf
	_Country of the Pointed Firs_ by ???
	_The Golden Notebooks_ by Doris Lessing





-- 
Not one of the 85% of Americans who didn't see Halley's comet.

nadel@aerospace.aero.org