Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Margaret Atwood
Standard Name: Atwood, Margaret
Birth Name: Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Nickname: Peggy Atwood
Indexed Name: M. E. Atwood
Well before the end of the twentieth century MA
had become one of Canada's leading writers in multiple genres. She now writes for a global audience who read her more than forty novels , poetry,short stories, criticism, lectures, editing of anthologies, and experiments with new, mixed, and digital genres.
David Coward
, reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, commended HM
's bravura display of her endlessly inventive, eerily observant style. He praised her prose, maintaining that Words are the real heroes...
Literary responses
Adrienne Rich
Rich was during her lifetime and still is widely acclaimed and honoured as a major poet, theorist, and critic of culture. Her poetry and prose have been examined in literary and social criticism, and in...
Literary responses
Hilary Mantel
This novel won the Hawthornden Prize the year after publication.It received generally enthusiastic reviews, although Anita Brookner
evinced a degree of wariness in her comment: The novel, though expert, is unsettling. It is unsettling through...
Literary responses
Anne Sexton
AS
accepted the label confessional poet, although many commentators made that a basis from which to denigrate her work. Erica Jong
argued that this label downplays the element of achieved skill, wrongly suggesting that...
Literary responses
Hilary Mantel
Colin Burrow
found this novel brilliant, perhaps perverse, offering substantial and deep pleasure to the reader, excelling particularly when the historical record is uncertain or contradictory, well able to stand comparison with the portrait of...
Literary responses
Hilary Mantel
Margaret Atwood
(who confessed to a weakness for HM
) wrote that the character of Cromwell matches her particular strengths and praised the exercise here of her talent for intricacy and literary invention.
Atwood, Margaret. “Here comes a chopper . . ”. The Guardian, p. Review 6.
Review 6
Literary responses
Marina Warner
Many enthusiastic reviews followed the book's publication. Margaret Atwood
, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review found it crammed full of goodies . . . and profusely illustrated, as well as simply essential reading...
Literary responses
Toni Morrison
TM
won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. Black writers and critics had protested when it did not receive a National Book Award.
Cooke, Rachel. “America is going backwards”. The Observer, p. 15.
15
Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Twayne.
xiv
She said of this novel, I am not interested in...
Literary responses
Germaine Greer
A number of reviewers took this book to be misogynistic because of its unsparing estimate of women's failures to realising their potential. Other commentators (fellow-writer Margaret Atwood
, for instance) have cited it with respect...
Literary responses
Carol Shields
The back cover of the Vintage Canada edition of 1995 quoted Margaret Atwood
calling this [o]ne of the best novels I have read . . . deft, funny, poignant, and surprising and beautifully shaped.
Shields, Carol. Swann: A Mystery. Vintage Canada.
back cover
Literary responses
Naomi Alderman
Reviewer Sarah Ditum
concluded: The slide from tweaked normality to plausible horror is realised here as perfectly as in the best of John Wyndham
or Margaret Atwood in a version of the future [that] detonates...
Literary responses
Susan Hill
Margaret Atwood
in the New York Times Book Review called this work less a novel than the portrait of an emotion,
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
and likened it to a handmade quilt, as an intricate, carefully worked celebration of...
Literary responses
Tillie Olsen
Margaret Atwood
praised the message but faulted the scrapbook form (as did other commentators, too). Joyce Carol Oates
in the New Republic criticised the book for inconsistencies and inaccuracies.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
279
Book Review Index. Gale Research.
4 (1969-1979): 355
Pearlman, Mickey, and Abby H. P. Werlock. Tillie Olsen. Twayne.
143
Leisure and Society
Naomi Alderman
In spring 2011 NA
took a course in running which provided the inspiration for the smartphone game Zombies, Run!
Chatfield, Tom. “Escape the marauding zombies . . . and burn calories at the same time”. theguardian.com.
With Margaret Atwood
, her mentor on the Rolex scheme for partnering younger artists with distinguished...
Intertextuality and Influence
Carol Shields
She maintains that the emergence of a Canadian Literature narrative has slightly distorted perceptions of SM (whose literary accomplishment she rates only very moderately), but that study of Moodie's four novels can shed light on...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Atwood, Margaret. The Heart Goes Last. Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, 2015.
Atwood, Margaret. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Oxford University Press, 1970.
Atwood, Margaret, and Charles Pachter. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Macfarlane, Walter, and Ross, 1997.
Atwood, Margaret, editor. The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. Oxford University Press, 1982.
Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. Canongate, 2005.
Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. Vintage Canada, 2006.
Atwood, Margaret. “The road to Ustopia”. Guardian Weekly, pp. 25-7.
Atwood, Margaret. The Robber Bride. McClelland and Stewart, 1993.
Atwood, Margaret. The Tent. McClelland and Stewart, 2006.
Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood. McClelland and Stewart, 2009.
Atwood, Margaret. “To the light house”. The Guardian, p. 28.
Atwood, Margaret. Two-Headed Poems. Oxford University Press, 1978.
Atwood, Margaret. “Ursula K Le Guin . . . ’One of the literary greats of the 20th century’”. theguardian.com.
Atwood, Margaret. “What ’The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump”. The New York Review of Books.
Atwood, Margaret, and Naomi Alderman. “Why we’re co-writing a zombie novel”. theguardian.com.
Atwood, Margaret. Wilderness Tips. McClelland and Stewart, 1991.
