“Writing,” Elena Ferrante tells us in her engaging, slyly disruptive new collection of essays, expertly translated by Ann Goldstein, “is entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned.” The tombs, Ferrante suggests, are filled with our literary patriarchs, the great men who have dominated literature since writing began. The profaners are …
THAT DAMNED MOB OF SCRIBBLING WOMEN: My July Column at Bookslut
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a letter to his publisher in response to the overwhelming success of female writers at the time. Novels such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1849), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1854) by Sara Payson Willis Parton …
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