This, I think, does count as actual rediscovery of a neglected, if not entirely forgotten, author of the 60s/70s: Lost Beneath the Waves of Time: Jane Gaskell in/and the ’60s (and reading that I realise that she was a lacuna in those studies of Angry Young/Rebel Women Writers of the same period, but probably she was just too Out There and In Genre ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished March Sisters, which was quite good in that personal-essays-about-books mode. But a thing I noticed with this, and with the Tatar book below, is that they seem not to have read the later sequels? In which Jo as 'Mother Bhaer' does actually get back to being a writer, and there is that scene with the excruciatingly awful ( Read more... )

Because when I hear somebody is putting out a book about neglected awesome heroines, my reaction is usually a deep groan and a murmur of 'Rosalind Franklin - Lise Meitner - Ada Lovelace - Mary Anning - ' all those usual suspects whom I have heard only too often described as heroines hidden from history. 'Hidden' in some unusual meaning of that word ( Read more... )

And they are 'unexamined-assumptions' and 'facile-preconceptions'.
Because, really, there are a lot of these among people who should really know better, such as women who write and review books about women and the sea: Salt on Your Tongue: Women and the Sea by Charlotte Runcie - review.
Which includes the memorable claim: In the way of generations ( Read more... )

Have seen, flickering past me in the sidebar on GoodReads - I assume these are promoted works - something that declares 'No more wimpy heroines!'
Hellooooo? Quite apart from this being late to the party as far as the notion of the Strong Woman Character goes, I think a case can be made that there is a long tradition of heroines who do not conform ( Read more... )

A couple of weeks ago I was being interviewed by A Journalist for their obligatory piece on 50 Shades (you write one short article on the history of sadomasochism, and forever after you are A Nexpert) in which I pointed out that the text was an absolutely stock romance trope in which He starts out with All The Power and by the end She has acquired ( Read more... )

Okay, there seems to be an acceptance around of the fact that the female characters in sff should no longer be Ye Damsel, there to get menaced by the villain, kidnapped, rescued, and generally motivate the hero by having stuff done to her, etc etc.

Howsumdever: and okay, this new generation of female characters have abilities and competence and do ( Read more... )

I'm doing a meme. It's been around before, but I like it.

This iteration, via
( Read more... )

I have been vaguely thinking about rereading/reading some Nevil Shute following recs by Jo Walton at her tor.com blog, since our tastes have a good deal of overlap.

Anyway, I picked this up in the Oxfam shop last week. I first read it (in an abridged/expurgated schools edition, and then the full thing from the local library) when I was about 13. My ( Read more... )

Because it feels like time to do one of these.

Read for review or research:
Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, Unauthorized Pleasures: accounts of Victorian erotic experience (2003): quite good, perhaps not tremendously useful for my particular purposes (too much close reading of rather specific texts, not enough wider context), but was exceedingly good on ( Read more... )