On Gender in Literature
By: Joanna Walsh Joanna Walsh is the author of two books this fall, the short story collection Vertigo, and the nonfiction book Hotel, the latest in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. Walsh writes on the notion of female genius, and looking back at the women who influenced her own writing. In her ‘novel from life,’ How Should a Person Be, Sheila Heti wrote, tongue-incheek, ‘One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like’. I’ve been wondering recently how much it matters to me as a writer to have ‘geniuses’ to look back at, and whether it matters that some of them were women. In the last few years, I’ve discovered for myself the work of experimental British women writers of the late twentieth century: Brigid Brophy, Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, and especially Christine Brooke-Rose, among others. If I were to look for past geniuses as examples, these are the sort I would be looking for all of them trying to do something new. Yet even having found them, I feel I have to justify why I find the influence of those women writers particularly important of a slightly different quality to the influence of male writers, for example Georges Perec, whose work influences me as well. What is the particular kind of connection I feel to female experimental writers from the past? Why should that difference exist? Brooke-Rose herself at first denied that she felt different as a woman writer of indeterminate work, a term she preferred to experimental. Yet later Brooke-Rose became aware that the woman experimental writer has more difficulties than the man experimental writer, in the sense that, however much men have accepted women’s writing, there is still this basic assumption, which is unconscious, that women cannot create new forms. I find I’m often compared to women writers and rarely, if ever, to men. I’ve heard this is something that often happens to women writers, which can be a problem as there are so many more historical male geniuses to go round. I’d like my writing to be thought of in terms of my male influences too, but this bias toward women writers is understandable: I write mostly, though by no means exclusively, about women, and, if I do manage to create new forms, my impetus has often been the difficulty I have found in accepting conventional narratives of women’s lives, around sex, marriage, family, work. The experiences of women I know, and my own life, seem so seldom to fit the stories I’ve been told. Experimental writing is sometimes used as though it were an offensive term, as though the desire to experiment were an aggressive and unnecessary tinkering with
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Mahasweta Devi “Please don’t wr
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The Horror of Female Adolescence an
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sexual drive is reduced to somethin
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Favorite Authors & Favorite Books:
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Doris Lessing Sandra Cisneros The O
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Women in Love? - It’s frustrating
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to the most recent Pew Report. That
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Editor—Elizabeth Pike Managing Ed
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