Communities of Women by Nina Auerbach

Nina Auerbach has quite a dazzling scope in this book. She looks at the development of communities of women in British and American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She pairs Pride and Prejudice with Little Women, Cranford with Villette, and The Bostonians with The Odd Women, and then focuses her discussion on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in the last chapter. These communities, she contends, grow increasingly more encompassing as time goes on: while the Bennett sisters are waiting for husbands, and the March sisters must be married off to finish the book, Miss Brodie's fascist leanings incorporate a militancy and a sort of political self-sufficiency.