The Daughter as Reader brings together personal narrative and literary criticism to celebrate the ways in which books enrich and shape our lives. Paula Marantz Cohen's engagingly written vignettes explore a range of literary and cultural themes from highly personal and provocative new perspectives. In "Turning the Screw on Dr. Spock," her analysis of Henry James's work yields startling insights into the art of raising children.

In "Poetry and Sexual Harassment," Cohen's reading of a Thomas Wyatt poem illuminates her understanding of this complex and troubling problem. The book's other essays, including "Rx for Premature Labor: Reading Trollope," "Born to Shop," and "Makin' Whoopee: The Art of Female Self-Performance," treat a range of compelling topics and highlight their resonances within literary works by Marcel Proust, Alice Walker, Jane Austen, and William Wordsworth, among others.

1. Courageously and creatively attempting to heal the breach between the private and the public - the literary and the critical, the mother and the professional, the wife and the feminist - it is essential reading for anyone interested in the connections among the personal, the literary, and the philosophical.