In Love and Struggle

In her fascinating new book, Margaretta Jolly demonstrates an acute awareness of the public/private, personal/political divide between literary forms; this perspective is also central to her project of investigating the correspondence of second-wave feminism. These letters disclose not celebrity secrets but insights into the joys and anguish of relationships between women. Traditionally, letter writing has been seen as part of the ritual of literate femininity; indeed, a survey in the 1980s confirmed this as a continuum. Girls apparently write twice as many letters as boys – suggesting, perhaps, a confirmation of the conventional view that women are more interested in interpersonal relationships. To what degree this paradigm holds in relation to twenty-first-century e-mail habits would make an interesting further study. However, there is another implication, which challenges traditional psychological and philosophical concepts of the autonomous self, by appealing to the idea of the relational self, as it is refracted via relationships between women

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