Apologies to Andrea Dworkin, who did not like book critics and who, fourteen years after her death, from myocarditis, at fifty-eight, is being subjected to a round of us again. “I have never written for a cowardly or passive or stupid reader, the precise characteristics of most reviewers,” she wrote in the preface to the second edition of “Intercourse,” the work that presented her alienating theory of heterosexual sex as a violation, “a use and an abuse simultaneously,” and “the key to women’s lower human status,” among other descriptions. “Overeducated but functionally illiterate, members of a gang, a pack, who do their drive-by shootings in print,” reviewers seemed to deny her the authority of her personal experience of rape, prostitution, and domestic violence, which they did not understand, and to wave aside the literary criticism in the book, which they also did not understand. “I will check back in a decade to see what you all think,” she wrote in a scathing letter to the Times, in 1987, responding to its pan of the first edition of “Intercourse.” “In the meantime, I suggest you examine your ethics to see how you managed to avoid discussing anything real or even vaguely intelligent about my work and the political questions it raises.”

Out of the fray emerged the idea that she believed all sex was rape, which, along with her frizzy hair, dumpy overalls, and uncompromising positions on sex work and sadomasochism, came to epitomize radical feminist hostility throughout the nineteen-eighties and nineties. Dworkin was widely regarded as sexless and “anti-sex,” feminism’s image problem incarnate, hated by various denominations of liberals and—except when she was campaigning against pornography—conservatives alike. Though she tempered her contempt for establishment stupidity with a naughtily blunt sense of humor and a deep-down belief that people could examine their ethics and change, her reputation always preceded her work, and she knew it. Foregrounding her shrewdness as a reader—or her pathos as a human being—didn’t much help. While she was working on “Intercourse,” one colleague told her to include a “prechewed” introduction “to explain what the book said,” which she did, sardonically. Others advised her to use a pseudonym.

A new anthology of Dworkin’s writing, “Last Days at Hot Slit” (Semiotext(e)), edited by Johanna Fateman and Amy Scholder, suggests that the drastic, fringe ideas she promoted, despite the personal and professional consequences, might seem less threatening today. It’s also an opportunity to reassess her style. The collection brings together writing from Dworkin’s major books, including extracts from her two novels, “Ice & Fire” (1986) and “Mercy” (1990), as well as one from “My Suicide,” a twenty-four-thousand-word unpublished autobiographical essay from 1999, which Dworkin’s longtime partner, John Stoltenberg, a gay man and an activist, found on her computer after she died. Dworkin was a lucid, scarily persuasive writer, and much of this material reflects her argument, in “Pornography: Men Possessing Women,” that “Everything in life is a part of it. Nothing is off in its own corner, isolated from the rest.” The anthology is as much an account of Dworkin’s life as it is a presentation of her work; her project was to show how misogyny and violence against women were, like women themselves, “real,” a favorite word, and from an early age she offered up her own experiences as evidence. When she was a freshman at Bennington College, she was arrested at a protest against the Vietnam War and taken to jail, where she was subjected to a brutal pelvic exam that left her bleeding and traumatized; at the urging of Grace Paley, a fellow-protester whom Dworkin looked up in the phone book afterward, she reported her story to the newspapers, prompting a grand-jury hearing. The jail was eventually shut down.

Between this galvanizing incident—which shamed her parents back in New Jersey—and the publication of “Woman Hating,” nearly ten years later, Dworkin worked as a prostitute, moved to Amsterdam to write about the anarchist movement Provo, and married an activist, who violently abused her. She left the marriage, crediting her escape to a feminist, and vowed to “become a real writer and . . . use everything I knew to help women.” The process of writing “Woman Hating” showed her just how much she knew; experiences like hers, with “male dominance in sex or rape in marriage,” weren’t yet “part of feminism” in the early nineteen-seventies. Perhaps anticipating the mocking, vitriolic dismissal she would encounter throughout her life, Dworkin sets out her intentions in the very first sentence, with her trademark clarity and purpose: “This book is an action, a political action where revolution is the goal.” What’s more, it certainly was not “academic horseshit.”

The latter claim is correct; the former, for those appraising Dworkin, may have been a little too convincing. What’s so exciting to watch, reading “Last Days,” is not her political trajectory but the way her style crystallized around her beliefs. Dworkin saw being a writer as “a sacred trust,” which many of her peers had violated for money, and inextricable from that dedication was her love of texts and her faith in their power. Even as she acknowledged that she worked “with a broken tool, a language which is sexist and discriminatory to its core,” she aimed to “write a prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilizing than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography.” Her sentences barrel forward, strong-arming the reader with unlikely pauses or abrupt images; they force “you to breathe where I do, instead of letting you discover your own natural breath.”

You could call this a masculine way of writing, if you believe in that kind of distinction. It’s almost like revenge, a contradiction of her rejection of mere “equality”: “there is no freedom or justice in exchanging the female role for the male role.” In her preface to the second edition of “Intercourse,” Dworkin describes the book’s style in terms of domination, using the same phrases that she applies to intercourse itself. Of the male authors she analyzes, she writes, “I use them; I cut and slice into them in order to exhibit them.” The exhibition is affecting. Though the book is organized by broad themes—“Repulsion,” “Stigma,” “Possession”—Dworkin is most at home in the specific, when she’s conducting extensive close readings in the mode of an old-school literary critic. For those who associate her with a pungent misandry, it can be a surprise to find that her scorn, insofar as it exists, is grounded in considered surveys of Bram Stoker, Kōbō Abe, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among others. In a chapter on virginity, she turns to D. H. Lawrence, for whom “virginity was ‘her perfect tenderness in the body.’ ” Then, in a little more than a page—which includes three block quotes—she compares his attitude, unfavorably, with that of Sophie Tolstoy, before bringing in a dash of Calvino to prove that, “in the male frame, virginity is a state of passive waiting or vulnerability . . . she counts when the man, through sex, brings her to life.” It is Lawrence’s ideal “phallic reality” that leads her to one of the book’s central questions: “To what extent does intercourse depend on the inferiority of women?”