BOOK REVIEW : Women Writers Swim Into Mainstream : THE WRITER ON HER WORK; Volume Two, New Essays in New Territory, <i> edited by Janet Sternburg,</i> W.W. Norton, $19.95, 232 pages

Diane Ackerman sails around Antarctica, and writes about it. Alison Lurie writes a letter to Diane Johnson: “A typewriter ribbon can be revived, in an emergency, by soaking it in vegetable oil. Pass it on.”

Elizabeth Jolley remarks, “I like to have the essential of housework done and correspondence answered before working at the novel . . . I find it very hard to emerge from the fiction to an uncared-for house. The move from the desk to the domestic, toward the end of an afternoon, is one of the most painful experiences.” Then, “I think that teaching, like nursing, helps writing.” And finally, “I want, in my writing, to be optimistic and fond.”

This sterling collection of essays is as pleasing as the dessert table at a very, very good restaurant. Twenty terrific women writers reveal a little something about their work, and about themselves.

It’s been about 10 years since Vol. 1 appeared, and a lot has happened since then. Women--to be general and simple about it--seem to have gotten the hang of it, that writing life; there is less and less about “juggling,” and much more about “playing,” more about “sweating,” more about thinking, fooling around, adventuring, writing it all down.

Let me digress. This quarter, at UCLA, a group of 70 undergraduates in an Australian literature class were asked to answer this exam question:

“If you had only one fictional life to live, would you live it as a child molester, a young wife, a crazed murderer or a loveless spinster who ends up in a nursing home?”

Of all these characters (from books by Tim Winton, Rod Jones, Rodney Hall and Elizabeth Jolley), more than 50 students, not just young women but those burly guys in shorts who sit in the back of the class, picked the spinster who ends up in the nursing home.

Elizabeth Jolley, and so many others like her, have opened up the secret lives of women, so that everyone can see the fun hidden there at the bottom of things. Women writers did it, nobody else. And these women in this anthology are some of the ones who brought dark, hidden lives out into the sunlight of public knowledge. It’s great, really. It’s amazing.

Bharati Mukherjee, who reminds us that she’s both a Brahmin and a woman--that is, an aristocrat, condemned to subservience--insists that now “I am an American, in the American mainstream, trying to extend it . . . I am not an Indian writer, not an exile, not an expatriate, I am an immigrant, my investment is in the American reality.”

Kaye Gibbons just as defiantly broke out of a trap: the rural poverty of her mother’s home, of “hot breakfasts, sterile Mason jars, quilts, and the square of clay dirt we tried to farm.”

For years, according to a tradition followed rigorously by Hemingway and Fitzgerald (and begun, according to Malcolm Cowley, by the narrative “La vie de Boheme” in the late 19th Century), life of the artist was seen to be suffering. You had to labor to write; you had to compete in order to write, and your reward would often be that drafty garret, and ever more suffering.

These essays offer a quiet counter-vision.

Patricia Hampl suggests that you can’t help writing about what you know and what matters; you can’t escape your material; it’s all over you, like a cheap suit. Rita Dove suggests that you don’t have to suffer to get a Pulitzer Prize, you can go out in the back yard and take pictures of the kids and “write like crazy,” and put poems together, and then you get the Prize.

These women, with the exception of Margaret Atwood, who appears here in a bracingly bad mood, seem delighted, even blissed out. They love reviewing, they love the teaching that so often goes with writing. They’re grateful to husbands and family who made their lives easier and they’re crazy about the work itself.

“We are here in order to serve,” writes Latina author Elena Poniatowski. “We are sent here to Earth by God . . . One handles very fragile material, people’s hearts; their names, which are their honor; their work; and their time.”

It was a good moment, in the early part of this century, when hordes of women all over the world began to write with such vivacity and diversity and compassion. The editor here, Janet Sternburg, has done a wonderful job. This book is a gift in every possible way.

Next: Constance Casey reviews “Moving Pictures” by Ali MacGraw (Bantam).