There have been two major conflicting tendencies in describing the history of American literary naturalism. One position confines the movement to a group of late nineteenth-century writers (Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton) and to the reflection in their work of the Darwinian ideas and social conditions of that moment. Another, more recent position, adopting more fluid criteria for inclusion, extends its presence well into the twentieth century and finds its continuing expression not only in the obvious instance of the 1930s proletarian fiction of John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell, for example, but in the work of often lesser-known women and African American writers.

Donna Campbell's Bitter Tastes, as its subtitle announces, is self-consciously and firmly in this second school. Her emphasis is on the attraction of naturalistic ideas and forms of expression for women authors between 1900 and 1930 as they documented in their ficion the limitations faced by women of the period seeking not only a degree of personal freedom but also the rudiments of a decent life. Campbell accepts that the fiction of these writers is often different from that of earlier naturalists both in its greater sentimentalism and sensationalism and in its commitment to specific feminist causes. She therefore adopts the stratagem of designating it “unruly naturalism” in contrast to the “classic naturalism” of the 1890s founders of the movement (4). After an introduction discussing the concept of “unruly naturalism,” the study devotes seven chapters to its specific phases, of which the initial two deal with late nineteenth-century writing and the remainder with twentieth-century expression. It is these later chapters which break much new ground as Campbell convincingly demonstrates the ways in which hitherto neglected kinds of fiction written by women cohere around such topics with a naturalistic cast as bohemian sexuality, the fallen woman, abortion, the oppressed farm wife, and the household servant. Each chapter begins and ends with a brief discussion of the “unruly naturalism” of its subject matter, while its long central section is devoted to full examination of several examples. A number of movies are also discussed in these later chapters, though on the whole films do not constitute a major element in the study.

It is difficult to do justice to the extent of Campbell's research and to the quality of her writing. She appears to have read almost every work of fiction written by American women from 1870 to 1930, and she is equally at home in the secondary material bearing on this writing, including its cultural history. (The “Works Cited” section of the study runs to twenty-three pages.) And she is an excellent close reader in the traditional sense of the term, writing clear and persuasive mini-essays about each of the works featured in a chapter.

Of Campbell's two major interrelated concerns in Bitter Tastes – arguing for the pervasive presence in early twentieth-century women's writing of an “unruly naturalism,” and describing significant feminist themes in this expression – it is perhaps the latter enterprise that may have the greater permanent impact. Her conception of “unruly naturalism,” while playing a useful purpose in establishing continuity between the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forms of American naturalism, may not serve other literary historians as well. But where Campbell is strongest – in her ability to demonstrate the distinctive ways in which American women writers of the 1900–30 period dramatized the specific conditions of American life that negatively impinged on women's lives – she is very strong indeed. In Bitter Tastes she has produced a seminal work in this important area, one which both defines its character and opens it up for further exploration.