Marilyn French Biography and List of Works

American author, famous for her feminist novels. In her work French underlines that the male-dominated culture is founded on contempt for women, as examined in her study The War Against Women (1992).

"Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it. But men's long-standing war against women is now, in reaction to women's movements across the world, taking on a new ferocity, new urgency, and new veneers.''
(from The War Against Women)

Marilyn French was born in New York into a poor family of Polish descent. She took a B.A. at Hofstra College (now University) in Long Island in 1951, and left the college to marry. In 1964 French earned her M.A. and between the years 1964 and 1968 she was an instructor at Hofstra University. After raising two children and divorce, she continued her studies at Harvard University, taught English at Hofstra and received her Ph.D. in 1972. From 1972 to 1976 she was a teacher at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

French started to write seriously in 1957, but had only few stories and articles published in nearly twenty years. French's first book was her thesis on James Joyce (1976). It was followed a year later by The Women's Room, which became a huge success, was translated into some twenty languages, and made into a television movie in 1980. The central character is Mira Ward, whose life is traced from her childhood to middle age. Additional views offer other voices, whom Mira encounters on her voyage of self-discovery. Mira builds her life after divorce and finds men incidental - there is no co-existence between the sexes.

"I don't know any successful woman with love in her life. Men can manage it, but not women. Disproportion in numbers, and besides, men are too threatened by independent women. They can always find one who will build up their ego. And I, we, independent women, can't find a man who doesn't need continual bolstering."
(from Her Mother's Daughter, 1987)

The battle between sexes also was the main subject in French's second novel, The Bleeding Heart (1980). This time the story focused on a middle-aged woman, who has a love affair with a married American man on her sabbatical leave in England. The relationship of a submissive woman and a dominant man is doomed. In her non-fiction scholarly book Shakespeare's Division of Experience (1981) French examined the polarity between the masculine and feminine principles. She argued that Shakespeare "never abandoned belief in male legitimacy or horror of female sexuality." Her Mother's Daughter (1987) was a story about four generations of women, and the bond between mothers and daughters. The narrator, Anastasia, is determined to avoid the oppression of her forbears, but she is haunted by that collective past. Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals (1986) was a series of essays on the history of the treatment of women by men in the past 2500 years. The book was criticized for romanticizing matriarchal cultures.

The success of The Women's Room enabled French to write and publish without doubt and anxiety about money. In 1992 appeared The War Against Women, a study of oppression and violence of different institutions and individuals in patriarchal world. According to French, the violence has become more threatening as an answer to Feminist movement. French argued that physical, economic, and political attack on women is an intrinsic part of today's male-dominated global society.

In Our Father (1995) the presidential advisor Stephen Upton has suffered a stroke, and his daughters gather in his mansion to await his death or recovery. Gradually they learn one another's secrets and the truth about the life they might have shared. My Summer with George (1996) was a story of a summer love affair. The protagonist is Hermione Beldame, a women's romance writer who meets George Johnson, a southern newspaper editor, and starts to fantasize about her future with George. A Season in Hell (1998) was French's personal account of her journey through cancer treatment. She was offered no hope but survived metastasised oesophageal cancer.

Central themes in French's books: feminism, the battle of sexes (see also Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedman, Germaine Greer, Doris Lessing) - For further reading: Contemporary Popular Writers, ed. by Dave Mote (1997); World Authors 1975-1980, ed. by Vineta Colby (1985)

THE BOOK AS WORLD: JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES, (1976)