SOURCE: "Political Attentiveness vs. Political Correctness: Teaching Pat Barker's Blow Your House Down," in College Literature, Vol. 18, No. 3, October, 1991, pp. 44-54.

Ardis is an American critic and educator. In the following essay, she discusses the effect of Barker's Blow Your House Down on her college literature classes and examines the ways in which the novel addresses various feminist themes.

The author blurb on the inside back cover of the Ballantine paperback edition of Pat Barker's novel Blow Your House Down (1984) reads as follows: "Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1943. She was educated at the local grammar school and at the London School of Economics, where she studied economics, politics, and history. She is married to the Professor of Zoology at the University of Durham, and she has two children." Why, my students ask, did Barker write this book about working-class prostitutes trying to protect themselves from a...