Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson's Courting Failure tries at once to be a work of feminism, an assault on the established canon of “great” literary works, and a study of the representation of law in literature. There is a lot of ground to cover here, and it is not clear that limiting the focus to “women and the law in the twentieth century” sufficiently narrows the inquiry. Courting Failure does not lack interesting readings of interesting works, but those readings fail to resolve into a coherent “case” about women, the canon, or the law–literature enterprise.

Macpherson casts a wide net. She begins with works about prisons, moves to works about property, then to motherhood. Abruptly the book turns from these larger themes to genres, examining works written for theatre, then films. One could be pardoned for questioning the idiosyncracy of the choices of topics and, within each chapter, of particular literary works discussed.

Throughout, of course, the focus is women, the authors of most of the literary works examined and the subjects of all of them. Presumably transcending the sameness/difference questions that bedeviled earlier feminist jurisprudence, Macpherson describes herself as a taking a “postegalitarian” feminist stance, concerned with “equity not equality” (14). The works studied show women's strategies to resist, disrupt, or otherwise overcome (or not) a legal system that is simultaneously fixated on and yet somehow impervious to their gender. Macpherson admits the difficulty of claiming that women constitute a “special case” under law, understanding this as “a viewpoint that potentially essentializes women's position, concentrating on the similarity between individual women, but their difference from men” (105). The corrective is to “recogniz[e] that all women are potentially subject to the law in the way that men are not” (105–6, added emphasis). But as the experience of reading Courting Failure attests, the diversity of the ways in which women as women are subject to the law is so great that it is difficult to draw much in the way of conclusions about the way law treats women.

Nor does Macpherson get much further with the canon. She rehashes at some length the arguments made by Heilbrun and Resnik in the 1990s that the accepted canon is gendered in an unacceptable way. Whether she advances the ball here is questionable. There is no denying that the relatively less studied works on which she focusses (but should Beloved count?) show in ways perhaps different from more canonical works the way women are silenced, judged and (mis)represented by the law. But are these pictures “truer” than those within the canon? More “authentic”? By what standard?

Can literature truly show us something about law? It would seem that the premise of Courting Failure is that it can. There is no doubting that there are many depictions of law in literature, and that some of those are interestingly examined in this book. But it is worth asking whether the “law” in literature is, well, “law,” rather than someone's imagined picture of how law works. In other words, there are important methodological issues raised by the attempt to use artistic works to prove something about the real world. It may be that the contrast between the fictional and the real is overdrawn. It may be that art has a truth that mundane factuality does not. The law–literature project generally must take a position on these issues, or risk the dismissive treatment handed down by the likes of Richard Posner in his influential Law and Literature. By failing to address the fundamental methodological issues of the law–literature enterprise, Courting Failure courts irrelevance, at least in the American legal academy.