‘Here is the story of my career…’: the woman writer on film

Abstract

From Virginia Woolf’s entreaty to women writers to embrace the androgynous mind¹ to the recent controversies surrounding the justification for the Orange Prize,² the convenience and usefulness of appending the word ‘woman’ before ‘writer’ when considering female authorship and female writers’ place in the canon remains contentious. The conclusion of Mary Eagleton’s 2005 study of the female writer in contemporary fiction is that ‘it is inevitable that the figure of the woman author should feature so often in fiction as problem or irritant, as focus for struggles, as an expression of desire, as loss or as a harbinger of change’.³ Writer Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead — a book she tentatively suggests is ‘about the position the writer finds himself in; or herself, which is always a little different’⁴ — provides a series of poignant insights into the grand subject of ‘Writing, or Being a Writer’⁵ by recalling her own first forays into the field in the 1950s:

A man playing the role of Great Artist was expected to Live Life — this chore was part of his consecration to his art — and Living Life meant, among other things wine, women, and song. But if a female writer tried the wine and the men, she was likely to be considered a slut and a drunk, so she was stuck with the song; and better still if it was a swan song.⁶