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.
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
Hilary Mantel
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...
Travel
Liz Lochhead
LL
went to Glendon College in Toronto, on the first Scottish Arts Council
Scottish/Canadian Writers' Exchange.
The Canadian writer who spent that year in Scotland was the novelist Graeme Gibson
, Margaret Atwood
's partner.
Smith, Ali. “Liz Lochhead: Speaking in Her Own Voice”. Liz Lochhead’s Voices, edited by Robert Crawford and Anne Varty, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1-16.
8, 13
Textual Features
Liz Lochhead
In considering the question of why Mary Shelley
created monsters, LL
says she was haunted by that phrase from Goya
: The sleep of reason produces monsters. If you try to force things to be...
Textual Production
Ursula K. Le Guin
UKLG
's volume of trenchant, funny, lyrical essays or blog posts, No Time to Spare. Thinking about What Matters, covered, as Margaret Atwood
wrote, everything from cats to the nature of belief, to the...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jolley
EJ
invoked as an appropriate description of her own motivation, Flaubert
's dictum that writing comes from an inner wound.
Joussen, Ulla. “An Interview with Elizabeth Jolley”. Kunapipi, Vol.
15
, No. 2, pp. 37-43.
40
She said of Johnson
's Rasselas and Goethe
's Elective Affinities (both of which...
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
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...
Textual Features
Germaine Greer
The selection of poets is highly informed. It reaches back in time before GG
's anthology Kissing the Rod, to Anne Askew
and Isabella Whitney
, and forward to Carol Ann Duffy
and Margaret Atwood
Textual Production
Germaine Greer
In 2013 GG
sold her archives (student notes and essays, scripts for the CambridgeFootlights Society
, literary and scholarly manuscripts, diaries, a handmade book designed for her friend Gay Clifford
, and professional and...
Anthologization
Maggie Gee
Her recent chapters in books include Beyond Ending in Bill Bryson
's Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society, 2010 (whose other contributors include Margaret Atwood
and David Attenborough
), Living...
Reception
Margaret Forster
In a National Women's Register
poll of members to determine the best woman writer of the twentieth century, MF
came third with twenty-one votes, just behind Margaret Atwood
with twenty-five and just ahead of Enid Blyton
The Imam rules and tyrannizes over an imaginary island. The rebellious heroine, Bint Allah (which means daughter of God), appears to have been illegitimately fathered by the Imam, and while it seems appropriate to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rosalind Coward
With essays under such titles as Ideal Homes, Kissing, Naughty but Nice: Food Pornography, and Men's Bodies, Female Desire interrogates the matter-of-fact details and events of everyday life, revealing the complex...
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.
