A manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a
generation of writers and scholars reissued after more than a decade. I am beginning to
realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out
feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about
the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature. On the last day
of December 2009 Kate Zambreno then an unpublished writer began a blog called "Frances
Farmer Is My Sister " arising from her obsession with literary modernism and her recent
transplantation to Akron Ohio where her partner held a university job. Widely reposted
Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy
portraits of the fates of the modernist “wives and mistresses " reclaiming the traditionally
pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot Jane Bowles Jean Rhys and Zelda Fitzgerald:
writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives
silenced erased and institutionalized. Over the course of two years Frances Farmer Is My
Sister helped create a community of writers and devised a new feminist discourse of writing in
the margins and developing an alternative canon. In Heroines Zambreno extends the polemic
begun on her blog into a dazzling original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that
have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it—she traces the genesis
of a cultural template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the “minor
” and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. “ANXIETY: When she experiences it it's
pathological ” writes Zambreno. “When he does it's existential.” With Heroines Zambreno
provided a model for a newly subjectivized criticism prefiguring many group biographies and
forms of autotheory and hybrid memoirs that were to come in the years to follow. A book that
has become its own canon Heroines was named one of the "50 Books that define the past 5 Years
in Literature" by Flavorwire an "Essential Feminist Manifesto" by Dazed and one of the "50
Greatest Books by Women" in Buzzfeed .
