One of the major developments in literary studies in the past twenty years or so has been the emergence of feminist criticism, at the level of both theory and practice. Initially feminist criticism reflected the political goals of feminism in that authors and texts were judged in accordance with how far they could be reconciled with feminist ideology. The "images of women" school of feminist critics adopts this point of view and is particularly concerned with how women characters are represented in literature. Josephine Donovan is one of its leading exponents and in the article reprinted here argues that for feminist criticism there can be no separation between the aesthetic and the moral aspects of literary texts even if this means judging adversely works as central to Western civilisation as Homer's Odyssey, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Goethe's Faust.