The Edible Woman | Literary Criticism & Book Review

The Edible Woman Critical Overview

In 1961, at the age of nineteen, Margaret Atwood wrote a collection of poems that she selfpublished. The collection was called Double Persephone and it won her the prestigious E. J. Pratt Medal. In 1966, another Atwood poetry collection, The Circle Game, won her the Canadian Governor General's Award. This was how she launched her career as a writer.

The Edible Woman was the first novel that Atwood wrote. At the time of its publication, Atwood was considered a poet. This may have played a part in the somewhat discouraging reviews of her first published attempts at prose. The book is described as being thin and tedious by several reviewers. Many of these reviewers do, however, see the potential in Atwood's writing and hold out hope that her next attempt at writing prose will be much better.

For example, in 1969 in a review in the...
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