Scrybblynge Wymmyn
I can think of plenty of her male contemporaries (including one or two of her fanboys), who were a lot more troubling/troubled, no? (P Larkin, I'm looking at you in particular): This excellent cradle-to-grave biography of a much loved novelist who goes in and out of fashion captures her alarming habits and tormented love affairs. Also, unlike certain esteemed writers of the 1930s, she stayed in the UK and did war service, just saying...
***
If you go down to the woods today - write one book in which a woman gets it on with a bear, and they never let you forget it: First published in the 70s, Marian Engel’s novel about a lonely librarian’s relationship with a bear interrogates boundaries between men and women, humans and animals. Well, yeah, maybe, but I seem to recall somebody pointing out if not immediately at the time, very shortly afterwards, there was a minor flurry of works (especially by Canadian women novelists??? I believe Atwood had one?) in which women Got In Touch with Nature in a very primeval way and Had Epiphanies.
***
I liked this: Dead Women Poets Are Not Your Punchline - there are so many Russ points hit there, in particular the one about women just splurge it all onto the page, men craft it, with a side of women are about their trivial girly issues, men are about the deep recesses of the human heart and its angsty sorrows: There is an unhinged emotionality tethered to “confessional.” But this is only if you’re not a man. Conroy, Steinbeck, Lowell, Nabokov, Vidal - they’re never “confessional,” only daring and forthright.
***
And Wendy Cope on inventing a struggling male bad poet as a voice to write in: The book also includes the work of the invented poet Jason Strugnell. His poems are poor imitations of a number of his contemporaries, including Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Craig Raine. He also wrote some Shakespearian sonnets bemoaning his fate as an unpublished bard.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3219769.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.