Quote:
Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer
I also like Barbara Michaels' books, which usually involve ghosts. Though they also have a bit of romance.
|
I really liked her Houses of Stone. It's a puzzle box of a book -- the protagonist is deciphering an old manuscript, trying to find out how it relates to things which really happened, and dealing with scary things -- both uncanny and mundanely murderous -- happening today. And in between the scary parts there's a great scene when the protagonist is pushed into giving a speech to the local book club and snaps:
Quote:
It felt like a sudden rush of water pouring into a container, filling something that had been empty before, rising from feet to body to throat till it overflowed her parted lips—anger, cold as melted snow, consuming as flame. It was unlike anything she had ever felt before, but it was not alien. It felt…right. Clearing her throat, she said, slowly and deliberately, “The Pen as Penis.”
She paused, expecting a gasp of collective outrage from the audience. There was no sound at all. The faces that stared back at her were like masks, unblinking, frozen. She saw Peggy clap her hand over her mouth.
“In 1886 Gerard Manley Hopkins—he was a poet, by the way—wrote, in a letter to a friend, ‘The Male quality is the creative gift.’ Ruskin—I’m sure you’ve all heard of Ruskin—was more direct. He described the ‘Penetrative Imagination’ as a ‘piercing mind’s tongue.’
“This image of the male quality, symbolized by the male member, as the only true source of literary and artistic creativity permeated nineteenth-century criticism and nineteenth-century attitudes.
“It is such an obvious pun, such a childishly irresistible symbol, that modern critics have been unable to abandon it. A book review that appeared in The New York Times in 1976 remarked that women writers ‘lack that blood-congested genital drive which energizes every great style.’ Well, of course they do, don’t they? Castrated by nature, lacking that essential instrument, they are by definition incapable of originality or a great style. Another critic, writing a decade later, employs an even more emphatic metaphor. Creativity, he says, arises from ‘the use of the phallic pen on the pure space of the virgin page.’ That metaphor certainly excludes women writers; it makes literature a variety of rape.”
...
“But what, you may ask,” she went on, “does all this have to do with Jane Austen? According to certain giants of criticism, her novels are not worthy of inclusion in the lofty canon of true literature. They lack—and I quote—‘a strong male thrust.’”
...
She gave them Jane from a feminist perspective—the subtle digs at male vanity, the cynical resignation of women who were passed from one male guardian to the next, without independence or legal identity—and ended by quoting one of Jane’s few overt protests against masculine domination. “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their story…The pen has been in their hands.”
|
