Feminist Fiction, Feminist Form

Abstract

The early seventies was a period of enormous productivity for women writers, British, American, and Canadian. Within 1972-1975 were published Doris Lessing's Summer Before the Dark, Margaret Drabble's Realms of Gold, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Toni Morrison's Sula, Dorothy Bryant's Ella Price's Journal, Lisa Alther's Kinflicks-to name only a few. That the early seventies was also the time when the women's liberation movement was at its height and when feminist literary criticism came into existence is no coincidence, for both fiction and criticism were responding to the same social and intellectual climate: women were experiencing a new sense of possibilities, a breaking away from the constraints of the past, and this shaped both the literature they were writing and the criticism they were developing. Protagonists of feminist fiction-of Atwood's Surfacing, Gail Godwin's The Odd Woman, Jong's Fear of Flying, Laurence's The Diviners-speculate about images of women and cultural stereotypes at the same time that feminist critics are contemplating these issues: Mary Ellmann's Thinking about Women, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Carolyn Heilbrun's Toward a Definition of Androgyny, Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land, and Josephine Donovan's Feminist Literary Criticism were all published between 1968 and 1975.