I suppose writers write what they gotta write
But I must say I was quite chuffed to see somebody expressing a certain tiredness with the narrative of exquisitely rendered female suffering that ends in obliteration.
(Also I am really not sure that I want to go anywhere near a novel that is described as 'in the manner of John Fowles's eponymous Collector'.)
Maybe I'm prejudging, but having fairly recently read Stella Benson's I Pose (1916), which ends with the suffragette heroine blowing herself up, and Vita Sackville-West's Family History (1932), middleaged woman dies of (somewhat wilfully contracted) pneumonia after her love affair with a younger man comes to grief, I do wish that we could get past the idea that it is the higher art for the female protag to suffer and end like Dido in the ruins of Carthage and not to survive and go on. (George Eliot's notion of the days for Antigones 'spend[ing their] heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial' being replaced by Dorothea's ' 'incalculably diffusive... unhistoric acts'.) This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2718724.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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