Reading Women's Writing

There is a recent documentary about Shere Hite, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who wants her to be remembered. I've been trying to access it but it isn't available in Australia yet.  Journalist, Suzanne Moore, has written about the documentary here .  Shere Hite's book, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, was published in 1976. It reports the results of surveying over 3000 women  between the ages of 14 and 78  about their sexual experiences and desires. I read it in the mid 1980s. I recall the boy who lent me his copy - a nerdy young man who I worked with on the Census. It was a six month contract doing the coding and data entry of the national census and threw together a large range of people who were happy to work a six month contract doing boring work. Most of us listened to tapes on our Walkmans as we worked. There were punks saving for a new guitar amp, stay at home mums returning to the workplace, retired older people who just wanted to...

A crime story in the hard-boiled detective / film noir style set in LA and published in 1947. I'm not giving anything away when I tell you the criminal is the narrator and we, as readers, are in his head. Dix Steele, at a loose end in LA, connects with an old war buddy who is now a police detective on the case of finding a serial killer. As a reader I was intrigued by his psychology, and, to be honest I didn't catch on about some clues as early as I should have. I knew he had to be caught (it's morally right) but I had no idea how. Also, he's kind of charming and cool, and we don't see the details of his crimes, so we can accept him as the people around him accept him. And there's the rub! The women around him are suspicious though, so there's some consolation in that.  I quite liked this: 'Lochner was the tall, thin man. His clothes were a little too big for him, as if he'd loss weight worrying.'  I was quite shocked by the casual cruelty of thi...

This short novel (140 pages) was a surprise and a delight. Published in 1918, it is a like a equivalent to the WWI poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon but from a woman's perspective. The setting is a country house in England, and the story is told by the cousin of the soldier who lives there with the wife of the soldier. The soldier, Christopher, has suffered shell shock and has lost his memory of the past fifteen years, and believes he loves a woman his wife does not know, a woman who is regarded as low class. It incorporates ideas about class, psychology, loss, ethical dilemmas and how people reveal themselves in a crisis. And, of course, the impact of war. Rebecca West was also a journalist, literary critic and essayist. Her acclaimed non-ficton works include 'Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia' (1941), which combines travel writing, history, political and cultural analysis, and 'A Train of Powder' (1955) about Britain's foreign ...