REVIEWING MY COLLECTION:Alone!Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women by Rosemary Dinnage

I was, by the account of every family member senior to myself, a cypher straight from the moment I gasped my first lusty breath.I was certainly a maddening, stubborn and temperamental child bent on having her own way at all costs, including the flat-out refusal to sleep, the latter with which I plagued my family from earliest infancy. I was also preternaturally shy and prematurely bookish, with my reading life commencing at age three. I was, most fortunately, blessed with a mother who encouraged me to be true to my quirky nature. Thus, while I grew up at odds with boring normalcy, I rarely worried about fitting in and was entirely impervious to peer pressure.The path of genuine, unencumbered eccentricity is still a hard one to trek but it is vastly easier to accomplish today than at any previous time.

'Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women' focuses on the life journeys of more than 2 dozen individuals, many of them creatives or intellectuals in their own right or, in some cases, appendages or muses of well-known men. Rosemary Dinnage approaches her subjects with temperate illumination, understanding and breadth. She does not overstate things that she cannot know undeniably but presents her hypotheses with grace, thoughtfulness and skillful scholarship.

The women profiled came to inhabit their outsider status through paths varied and predictable; nor can their marginalization and relative isolation be perfectly, neatly pinpointed. With so many personalities,backgrounds and quirks under the magnifying glass of our attention, it is natural to gravitate towards certain of the women while remaining aloof from others.I have always had an affinity for Katherine Mansfield and an aversion born of bafflement for Simone Weil.Both writers were prickly, brilliant, erratic and self-important yet I feel a kindred spark to Mansfield's brand of egoism and sheer annoyance with Weil's inept self-sacrifice, which is full of its own brand of vanity.Although this book did nothing to change that bottom line, it did carve new nuances into my long-held prejudices, which is hard to accomplish.

She gives equal attention to the famous and the obscure, and to those who fall into the netherworld between those parameters.Painter and free-spirit Gwen John and diarist Alice James step,briefly yet unforgettably, out of the shadows of their famous brothers.Dinnage also profiles entire categories of women--including prostitutes and witches--which gives the book a wider imprimatur than it would have if it was limited to a collection of postage-stamp biographies. It becomes, in an informal way, a sort of sociological treatise on rebel women and their place, or lack of it, in society.

PHOTOS, TOP TO BOTTOM: ALICE JAMES,KATHERINE MANSFIELD