SOURCE: French, Marilyn, and Barbara A. Bannon. “Marilyn French.” Publishers Weekly 217, no. 9 (7 March 1980): 6-7.

In the following interview, French discusses the role of feminism in literature and society as well as her novel The Bleeding Heart.

Seated in the lounge of New York's Algonquin Hotel, sipping a Bloody Mary and smoking a thin, brown More cigarette, Marilyn French looks like a well-to-do suburban housewife relaxing before catching a train home. She has just been listening sympathetically to another woman's wry account of how “the children will leave you alone in the kitchen for hours when you're making grilled cheese sandwiches, but if you sit down to practice the piano, they feel free to interrupt you constantly.”

It is this genuine sympathy for other women caught in life situations, trivial or deadly serious, for which they were never prepared that made Marilyn French's first novel, The Women's Room, such...