Critics do not appear to be especially impressed by Susan Sontag’s slim posthumous collection of essays, On Women. Although she praises some of the later essays in the Guardian, Olivia Laing concludes that it is “not a very good book about women.” Anna Leszkiewicz of the New Statesman claims that Sontag engages in “unsisterly arguments” and “is not interested in women as human beings, but as a political category.” At the Observer, Rachel Cooke dislikes the collection so strongly that she declares herself “amazed by [Sontag’s] reputation,” and wonders if Sontag suffered from “a particularly egregious case of internalised sexism.” An analysis of feminist essays from the 1970s is almost bound to produce some culture shock, but this collection, while flawed, is not the unqualified disaster these reviews imply.
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