The Women's Room

Amanda Lohrey (Essay Date 1979)

SOURCE: Lohrey, Amanda. "The Liberated Heroine: New Varieties of Defeat?" Meanjin 38, no. 3 (1979): 294-304.

In the following excerpt, Lohrey examines the plot and themes of The Women's Room, and comments on Diana Trilling's assertion that feminist works should avoid "existential despair."

As Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted, novels by women writers are an area where we have not had time to develop aesthetic distance, and any collection of them will often do no more than exemplify the eclecticism of modern fiction. This is true if one is surveying the full range (Murdoch, Lessing, Spark, Oates et al) but within that wide spectrum the last decade has seen the emergence of a clearly recognisable genre of American women's fiction—the biographical novel of the single heroic female self. This is most often...