In the following essay, Dever examines the works of several modern feminist authors—particularly focusing on The Women's Room and Carolyn Heilbrun's Death in a Tenured Position—and notes how they all portray feminism within their own unique personal and social contexts.

In the following essay, Rubenstein explores how feminist authors have portrayed female aging and maturity in their works, particularly in Doris Lessing's Love, Again and French's My Summer with George.

In the following interview, French discusses her body of work, the masculinity of language, and the critical reception of her novels.

In the following review, Erickson criticizes French's flawed examination of gender divisions in the works of William Shakespeare in Shakespeare's Division of Experience.

In the following essay, Sullivan examines how French portrays strained family relationships in Her Mother's Daughter.

In the following interview, French discusses American conservatism, the record of her battle with cancer in A Season in Hell, and modern feminist literature.

In the following review, Woodward compares A Season in Hell with Jane Lazarre's Wet Earth and Dreams, commenting that “[their stories are radically different, but neither one sentimentalizes the experience of suffering.”]

In the following review, McCabe considers several titles which offer personal perspectives on cancer, including French's A Season in Hell.

In the following review, Neverow-Turk argues that although the subject material of The War against Women is familiar, “the impact of the book is still intense and disturbing.”

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

In the following review, Wheelwright compares The War against Women with Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women.

In the following review, Jones-Davis criticizes French's prose in Our Father, arguing that the novel is “too preachy and badly written to count as literature.”

The trouble with feminist novels is that politics gets in the way of fiction, and sorting out the resulting reactions is like extracting Brer Rabbit from the briar patch. In this respect The Women's Room is no exception. The novel's basic thesis—that there is little or no foreseeable future for coexistence between men and women—is powerfully stated, but still invokes a lonely chaos repellent to most readers. In almost every other way, though, the novel is exceptional; and despite...

[Mira, the heroine of "The Women's Room,"] starts out submissive and repressed, anxious to live up to other people's expectations of her. She ends up liberated but lonely, painfully adjusting to a new kind of life. It's the period in between that make the book so interesting. (p. 7) The details of suburban life accumulate: balky ice-cube trays and Cub Scout meetings interlace with adulteries, attempted suicides and enforced stays in mental institutions. It's the sma...

Marilyn French's reading of Ulysses offers a bold and challenging new interpretation of the novel while most Joyceans are spending their time glossing and footnoting. The originality of The Book as World is found in its sustained effort to relate Joyce's successive styles to the overall meaning of the novel. It is odd that a novel with such a reputation for consummate artistic design should also be universally recognized to be formally problematic. Every serious reader of Ulysses must grapple ...

In the following excerpt, Thomas praises the wealth of information presented in From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume I: Origins but predicts that the series will be controversial among historians.

The heroine of Marilyn French's new novel is a bleeding heart because she weeps for all womankind. Like Mira, the narrator/protagonist of French's best-selling The Women's Room, Dolores feels as though she has swallowed the lives of every woman she has known, and merged their pain with her own…. A compendium of voices and stories, The Women's Room blazed with anger at the multiplicity of betrayals that were women's fate: its women were undercut by their own weakness...

Here is the sound of an author tipping her hand: "She turned, as always, to analysis, being a twentieth century woman and so subject to the superstition that what the mind could understand couldn't any longer hurt the heart, that what the tongue could utter was in the hand's control." It is the sound of an author urgently ordering and overruling her character, laboring to construct a sense of agon—contest, choice—when the evidence is already in and the outcome safel...

No one can accuse Marilyn French of having more than one string to her bow. If her first novel, "The Women's Room," was a didactic demonstration of why marriage won't work until the foundations of industrial society are altered, then her new book, "The Bleeding Heart," is exactly the same thing…. The trouble … is that her first novel succeeded despite its grave artistic shortcomings. Indeed, she managed to turn those shortcomings to her advantage, by s...

In the following review, the critic praises French's central argument in Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals but notes that the book is “overlong” and presents “a great deal of repetition.”

Marilyn French has written her second political novel, which is to say that the actions of the characters in both books are intended to demonstrate an ideological point of view. There was an almost documentary quality to The Women's Room, the long, widely-read first novel, which dramatized in two sections a rage-filled fundamentalist feminism. (p. 1) Polemical though it was, The Women's Room had its strengths. Its energy from start to finish derived from true fury. And in the beginning the ver...

The Book as World is an exciting book for two reasons: it has a coherent thesis which, if not absolutely original, does make a convincing case for a new reading of Ulysses; and its close reading of the text is exceptionally intelligent and illuminating. Marilyn French's main interest is in the style, or perhaps one should say the styles, of the novel, and in the roles of the narrator. She posits the notion of a malevolent narrator who contemptuously refuses to mediate the events in the book for the r...