The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten is a compelling read and an important story. Leslie Van Houten was 21 when she was sentenced to death for her part in the infamous 1969 "Helter Skelter" Charles Manson murders. Her sentence was converted to life in prison when the U.S. temporarily suspended its death penalty in the early seventies. Leslie and two other "Manson girls" were kept isolated in the old death row building at the California Institute for Women for many years for fear that the hold Manson had on them would be a danger to the general prison population. During this time the warden of the CIW, Virginia Carlson, invited Karlene Faith to meet these women. Faith had been teaching in the main prison and was invited to discuss the possibility of setting up courses in women's studies and other subjects for Leslie and her fellow two prisoners. Carlson was concerned for Leslie and the others and recognized that many years of brainwashing and programming, along with sexual and emotional exploitation by Manson, had left these "girls" without any sense of themselves or the ability to act on their own choices. Carlson recognized these women as victims of Manson and the growing cult phenomena, and although they were to be held accountable for the crimes they committed for Manson, she believed that they should not simply be dismissed as violent criminals. Carlson hoped that Karlene Faith could bring some awareness to these women about the growing women's movement and help them to gain some control back in their lives.

Faith says of Carlson:

Faith's book is extremely well written. Although it is classified as a biography, Faith incorporates feminist theory and legal rhetoric into her work. The result is a provocative analysis of the prison system that examines the gendered social processes that lead many women to prison and are key to understanding Leslie's story. Faith successfully combines a critical, feminist, academic voice with a compassionate but objective exploration of Leslie's life and experiences. What I find interesting about Faith's writing is the way she weaves her feminist teachings into Leslie's story, enabling the reader to understand the ways in which Leslie came to find herself again. Faith raises some important questions about women's experiences in prisons and challenges the reader to take a hard look at the criminal justice system and the value of life sentences that do little to reeducate or help these women.

Faith also incorporates dialogue of her own into the text, recording conversations she had with her friend and mentor, Ann Near, about the process of writing the book. These excerpts serve as a reminder that Faith's questions about the prison system cannot be answered or dealt with in the abstract or theoretical. They deal with human circumstance and the experiences of women in prison are at the heart of Faith's research and her book. Ann Near asks questions about the methods that Faith uses to examine Leslie's life and story, often forcing Faith to reassess her position. The dialogue between Faith and Near is intriguing because it emphasizes the difficult position that Faith is in as a storyteller who is also an academic, a feminist, a teacher and Leslie's friend. Faith successfully brings together all the pieces of Leslie's story with her own critical analysis to make the book the enjoyable read that it is. It is a compelling and fascinating account of a woman who is fighting for a chance to live the rest of her life free from the prison walls that still tie her to Manson. At 51 Leslie Van Houten remains in prison with no chance of parole in sight. Karlene Faith's book suggests that we should be asking why.

Kim Snowden

The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson is written in a sometimes daunting, scholarly language and will find a select readership: academics and students of Women's Studies or English. A fundamental understanding of semiotics and intertextuality is mandatory for a full appreciation of the complexities of such a text. However, if that appeals to you, let me say that Winning has written a powerful study of the life of Dorothy Richardson and her largest work, The Pilgrimage, a thirteen volume bildungsroman or, if you will, biography of a fictional character, Miriam Henderson. According to Winning, The Pilgrimage is a hidden narrative of lesbian desire in the early 20th century. Winning connects the events in Richardson's own life to those of her protagonist's life and makes a good case for a subtextual autobiography, or in Winning's useage, "auto/biography."

I am ambivalent about scholars who seek out lesbian writers from the past and explore and expose their lives and work. Such texts, while deconstructed in the present, will forever be a part of the past in which they were created, and if the lesbians who came before me worked hard to hide their sexuality, who am I or anyone else to dig up those bones? Yet, lesbian writers have a history, albeit censored and concealed, and modern students need to understand what homosexual lives were like before Ellen, Melissa and K.D. lived theirs under the gaze of contemporary pop culture. In the context of her time Dorothy Richardson left the best legacy she could, and a fine body of work. The Pilgrimage is a feminist quest where Miriam Henderson (Richardson's heroine), "search[es] for the core of what it means to be a female subject in the world"(14).

Virginia Woolf wrote about Richardson's fluid and flexible transcriptions of female consciousness: "She has invented a sentence that we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender." Winning's take on Dorothy Richardson will be controversial. Other scholars may dispute it or ignore it, but she makes her case thoroughly. Winning delves into the Freudian thought and theory from Richardson's era, including gender dysphoria and extensive analysis of a female homosexual patient case study. This section is thick with Oedipal symbols and can be somewhat overwhelming.

Winning deconstructs (or dykonstructs) both text and context. The Pilgrimage reflects the difficulties of writing about a lesbian affair in this historical place and time and explores how the trials of Radcliff Hall and Oscar Wilde definitively affected Richardson's text. Meanwhile, the social climate changed the cultural climate of post WWI Europe and suppressed fictional realism in literature as modernism demanded a new approach to writing, epitomized by the stream of consciousness writing of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Comparing Richardson to Woolf, Winning claims: "Both were motivated by twin aims: the desire to reconfigure the "map of fiction" and the wish to record lesbian desire in a way that would evade the homophobic censors of the British Establishment"(132). Many readers find Richardson's writing on the verge of a "private language" because of the subtextual strategies she deployed(134).

In addition to the coded lesbianism, Winning points out several instances of hidden narrative symbols echoing other lesbian works of the time, such as those of Hall and Woolf. The last section is devoted to silence, the censorious atmosphere of the written word and its affects on our literary legacy. Winning relentlessly emphasizes her points until the reader experiences this same epiphany, and understands just how hard lesbian writers have fought for a voice, and what their imposed silence has cost them.

In general, while this is not light reading, the reader-rewards are great. For me, by the time I finished the book my feelings had changed about scholars seeking out gay and lesbian writers from the past. Maybe we have a responsibility to do so, to read beyond the printed word, to examine the lives of the authors and the political times in which they lived, to evaluate the text, not mimetically, but with the epistemological approach of the German theorists, Burk and Kant. Put simply, in a period when authors were tried and imprisoned for their homosexuality, even women like Gertrude Stein took care with the written word. I don't think it would be uncommon for a lesbian to incorporate public homophobia into her personal belief system; this often happens today under better circumstances. We have a responsibility to put the text in the context in which it was written, and for gay and lesbian authors of the past that is doubly important.

Martha Miller