Writing Catholic Women (PDF)

JEANA DELROSSO is an Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, USA. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland, and her articles have appeared in NWSA Journal and MELUS.

Review from Choice:This book's brevity (together with its spider-speck print and prissy dust jacket) utterly belies the wit, energy, and robustness of both subject and treatment. In fact, DelRosso (College of Notre Dame of Maryland) offers a ranging exploration of recent literary representations of formative Catholic experience for women. Carrying the discussion beyond Elizabeth Evasdaughter's Catholic Girlhood Narratives (CH, Nov'96, 34-1357) and across genres and national boundaries, the author surprises the reader with the texts she treats as essentially Catholic - works by Isabella Allende, Shirley Goek-Lin Lim, Mary Gordon, Audre Lord, among others more obvious. Describing her approach as "polemically radical," DelRosso reveals the near-unbearable demands on girls/women built into Catholic orthodoxy and uncovers in these texts the rich veins of resistance, rebellion, comic subversion, and "religious syncretism" that defy canonical strictures and oblige one to rethink what it means to be Catholic in the 21st century. Though this reviewer wonders at certain omissions (e.g., recent rich Italian American women's writing), finding writers like Francine Prose, Ana Castillo, Edna O'Brien, Regina Barreca, Rigoberta Menchu , and Gish Jen in "conversation" under the same roof compensates and will invite lively discourse among readers in literature and religious studies. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. - - F. Alaya, emerita, Ramapo College of New Jersey