INTIMACY AND THEORY

‘Personal Criticism’, the term Nancy Miller used in 1991 to refer to ‘an explicitly autobiographical performance in the act of criticism’ had, as she acknowledged, many disparate roots in feminist writing in the seventies and eighties (Miller, 1991: 1). There had been, for instance, such diverse but bold experiments as Adrienne Rich's turn to autobiography in 1979 in her influential essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision’ (Rich, 1980), Rachel Blau du Plessis' montage of different discourses, including autobiographical asides, in ‘For the Etruscans’ in 1980, or Hélène Cixous' resounding ‘concert of personalizations’ in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (Cixous and Clément, 1975/1986: 84). All these examples have in common an element of surprise for the reader (certainly reading them in the early 1980s) which comes from their deliberate challenge to the accepted norms of academic discourse; but there was also a way in which they awakened a sense of collusion with the woman reader as well. Here was a space, it seemed, where secrets could be shared, a common alienation acknowledged, a different intimacy entered into. Criticism could openly address those vulnerabilities and desires which it was usually forced to conceal; it could admit the ways the intellectual was necessarily joined to the social, domestic and physical life.

It is perhaps not surprising that Between Women, one of the earliest collections of essays to foreground the subjectivity and personal life of the critic, also cited Virginia Woolf as an influence.