Looking back at The Writer on Her Work In 1978, I went looking for a book. In conversations with other women writers, I'd become aware of a new desire to link our lives and our writing, to connect personal experience with speculative thinking. In those days, we talked about female forebears who had been silent, and why; we then took on the work of speaking for them. We compared self-doubts, placing them in a political context, of systematic discouragement, looking at how we had internalized male judgments. Our commonalities were exhilarating; over them arched the knowledge that this thinking ...
