Quilt Stories: A Collection of Short Stories, Poems and Plays.

FEMINIST FASCINATION with quilts, which began among women artists and historians in the 1970s, has by now spread to literary critics and scholars who for the last ten years or so have been pursuing the analogies between textiles and texts. From reading quilts as stories -- the fabric texts of women's live -- we have moved to reading stories about quilts and, in turn, stories as quilts -- literary texts, that is, as pieced, as metaphorical quilts. These three books -- two collections of quilt stories and a collection of critical essays on the quilt as metaphor and cultural artifact -- all published in the space of a year, are witness to this burgeoning area of inquiry, to its possibilities but also its pitfalls.

Between them, Cuesta Ray Benberry's and Carol Pinney Crabb's A Patchwork of Pieces and Celia Macheski's Quilt Stories offer us over fifty literary works. These short stories, poems, novel excerpts and plays dealing with quilts were published over a span of 150 years, from the first-known such text, an anonymous essay from the 1845 Lowell Offering, to an excerpt from Whitney Otto's best-selling 1991 novel How to Make an American Quilt. Together they amply demonstrate that quilts have enjoyed a rich literary history. Although there is overlapping -- six writers appear in both volumes, five of them represented by the same story -- the two collections complement each other. Benberry and Crabb cover the period from 1845 to 1940; Macheski also begins in 1845 but concentrates on recent work. Almost three-fifths of her selections date from 1973 or later, contemporaneous with and in most cases inspired by the feminist rediscovery of quilts.

Many by now familiar works appear here, from the quilting-party episode in Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing and Mary Wilkins Freeman's "A Quilting Bee in Our Village," to Susan Glaspell's Trifles and Dorothy Canfield's "The Bedquilt," to such recent and frequently …