Le Guin left the West Coast to go to Radcliffe, followed by two years of graduate work at Columbia. Her scholarly field was medieval Romance literature. In her "Response to the Le Guin Issue" of Science-Fiction Studies, a gentle but pointed reproof of literary criticism, she asks why "no one has turned for elucidation of the later fictions to the early works of scholarship. Some, indeed, allude to her parents' scholarly qualifications, but none has pursued the lode which lies, obscure but probably still available to the persistent researcher, somewhere in the dimmer galleries of the Romance Languages departments of Radcliffe College and Columbia University." Though she turned away from scholarship after completing a master's thesis and disparages the value of her own scholarly work, she gained from the experience an acute critical perception of others' work and of her own. Her articles demonstrate extensive and thoughtful reading of fiction, both American and European, and poetry, modern as well as medieval. She considers her primary influences to be not Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Theodore Sturgeon, but Percy Bysshe Shelley, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Roethke, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Virginia Woolf, among others.
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