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Laura Miller at Salon has a great essay—provocatively titled, "Why can't a woman write the great American novel?"—on lit-crit rockstar Elaine Showalter's new book, A Jury of Her Peers, a mammoth study of American women writers. Lots to chew on, but the following bit jumped out at me, considering Emily's recent musings on how recession affects marriages and XX's conversation last month about writers' sugar-daddy fantasies:
... surveying this history, it seems that before the 1970s there was nothing more conducive to a[n American] woman's literary success than the failure of the men in her life. More often than not, what prompted these writers to sit down at their desks and send out their manuscripts to magazines and book publishers was the bankruptcy, desertion, idleness or death of her husband or father. When the touted sanctuary of the nuclear family let them down, and they needed the money to feed their children and keep a roof over their heads, their talents were finally loosed.
A potential silver lining to our current economic woes?
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