However, it is brave of Cusk to make the attempt. The editors perhaps did not - the edition could be defined as female-centric, rather than feminist. Lydia Davis' The Dreadful Mucamas, a tongue-in-cheek account of immigrant domestic servants and Julie Otsuka's piece about the children of Japanese agricultural labourers in the United States are the only two that express a concern with class in a feminist, revolutionary sense.
Caroline Moorehead's A Train In Winter, an excerpt from a book of the same title, is a harrowing account of the incarceration of 230 women French Resistance fighters in Auschwitz. This is feminism as sisterhood; how the women supported one another through the Holocaust - typhus, starvation, beatings, gangrene and unimaginable horrors - until the surviving 52 could walk away at the end of the war.
Older writers A.S. Byatt, Francine Prose and Laura Bell provide short, lively autobiographical pieces. Helen Simpson and Janice Galloway present us with tired, anachronistic exercises on role-reversal and menstruation respectively. Maja Hrgovic's moving Croatian story shows the redeeming chink of light love will cast on women in a war zone, and Taiye Selasi makes her publishing début with The Sex Lives Of African Girls a murky, uneven portrait of an abusive uncle. Urvashi Butalia's portrait of transvestite Mona, a hijra who attempts to adopt a child as a true expression of her femininity, is a fascinating insight into a closed community.
Jeanette Winterson's standout All I Know About Gertrude Stein closes the collection, interweaving anecdotal and possibly embroidered stories about Gertrude and her long-time love Alice B. Toklas with a contemporary lesbian love story. It is classic Winterson, bristling with controversial ideas. Mostly she muses on love and how it was once women's "whole domain", a centuries-old sentiment of Byron's that feminists have always scorned.
Winterson does not acknowledge Byron, but writes love was "the business of our lives, to give love to make love to mend love to tend love ... Now we have our own money and can vote ... I don't think we talk about love in real terms anymore."
This is a sad notion, that because we have our independence we have become incapable of loving, and one most women would dispute. Luckily she saves herself at the end with a rallying cry that stays with the reader long after the book is closed, "Love is not sentimental. Love is not second best. Women will have to take up arms for love. Take me in your arms. This is the Here that we have."
Stephanie Johnson is an Auckland writer.
