An Oral History of the Lesbian Avengers - fascinating. Though with this: I also think the internal fucking fucked the Lesbian Avengers. When you start getting into relationships and you’re happier, you protest less because you’re less outraged.
I was rolling my eyes somewhat and thinking, sounds more like a whole lot of intra-organisation ( Read more... )

Well, at least Richard Dawkins didn't think Metamorphosis was actually a work on entomology? - or maybe he did, and somebody said, 'No, Richard, it's fiction' and he was trying to work out how that worked? I picture him as one of those children in Victorian stories taught on the Grandgrindian method, or coming further up to date, along the lines ( Read more... )

Hadley Freeman in today's Guardian Weekend is miffed off at male columnists dissing on not just Nancy Mitford and The Pursuit of Love but anyone (silly gurliez!!) who enjoys it.
Okay, yet again this is men crapping on anything that women dare to like that they do not.
But I also take exception, or at least have problems with, the blanket dismissal ( Read more... )

How women conquered the world of fiction: 'From Sally Rooney to Raven Leilani, female novelists have captured the literary zeitgeist, with more buzz, prizes and bestsellers than men. But is this cultural shift something to celebrate or rectify?'.
(We remark that women have been doing rather well in the world of fiction since the days of Aphra Behn ( Read more... )

I mean, it's quite bad enough that P Roth was whingeing on about his wives/other women in his life failing to respect his creative processes and interrupting him with Mere Trivia -
- though looking at his output we do not see that it had any particularly Porlockian impact??? or were there GEMZ of prose and exquisite insight LOST to posterity?
- ( Read more... )

I don't know if anybody else has been noticing the reviews of the recent biography of Monica Jones, 'girlfriend of the more famous Philip Larkin' for many years in a very strange and rather horrible relationship.
Rachel Cooke, Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me review - a woman under the influence
Blake Morrison, Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me ( Read more... )

I was actually rather irked by this piece on British lesbian fascists, because a) I think there's a huge lacuna there, which is not talking about the (probably relevant) class origins or aspiration of the women along that trajectory b) 'many suffragettes became fascists'? (plz to be giving cites) c) I can think of several well-known lesbians ( Read more... )

Ten debut novelists - predicatably litfic and photogenic and mainstream published, siiiigh and all about the beginnings and the relatively young. Okay, they are becoming more diverse, modified yay.
And here we have the rediscovery, not for the first time, of the unexpected virtues of a despised genre, though, honestly, I am not sure all the works ( Read more... )

This is really one for the annals of ill-advised presents from husbands to wives - had she ever, ever declared, 'Darling! the deepest desire of my heart is a prehistoric henge'? The Man Who Bought Stonehenge For His Wife: It was then gifted to the public because she didn’t like it. She had even asked him to buy the set of dining chairs that was in ( Read more... )

What’s in a Name? Erasing women writers in the name of uplifting them: It is easy to get caught in the trap of historical revisionism when it comes to women writers, but this revisionism is rarely along progressive lines - despite its claims. Instead, it is a conservative reimagining of women struggling to survive in a man’s world that erases the ( Read more... )