Elkin is most interested in the art these women made — as she should be; their art is fascinating — but the book also argues that this art is often a response to the social structures that threatened to inhibit them.

Hybrid cultural criticism and memoir.

...she offers the original, bracing definition of her subject only to abandon it.

Erudite, provocative, and relentlessly eclectic.

She did a lot of reading and gallery-going. But its composition, ultimately, had to do with 'vibrations'.

The feminism in this book challenges the idea that all art by women is feminist, and that all feminist art must be by or about women. It universalises, instead of essentialising. Elkin centres the book around second-wave feminism.

Elkin weaves across the decades, writing into a current culture of rowbacks (Roe-backs?) in women’s lives.

Lively and vibrant.

Compulsively readable.

Elkin’s latest book is part feminist theory, part memoir. It is structured around encounters in thought, sculpture, painting, performance and text, with writers and artists who move her.

...intellectually rigorous and emotionally astute. Her supple narrative gives deep attention to a diverse gathering of second-wave feminist visual artists and writers, though her broad scope connects these women through time and lineage to past- and present-day artists, writers and themes.

Lauren Elkin’s study of rule-breaking female artists is admirable in intention – but the execution is contradictory and confused.

Dense and probing.