From the working library of novelist Angela Carter (1940 - 1992) with her posthumous bookplate. Quite dazzling.’ The New York Times’An ambitious work…Ĭonveys the fresh excitement of interpretative discovery… More than a brilliantly original literary interpretation, this fascinating volume provides penetrating insight into attitudes toward men, women, love, and power in Western culture.’A feminist’s view of William Shakespeare… Marilyn French, author of the acclaimed novels THE WOMEN’S ROOM and THE BLEEDING HEART, offers a feminist perspective on each of Shakespeare’s plays. Yet, in his later plays, there is evidence of a reversal in Shakespeare’s attitudes, a new fear of the power of the masculine principle and new admiration for the feminine. In his early plays, the so called masculine qualities of prowess, bravery, and individualism were accorded more respect than ‘feminine’ attributes of mercy, compassion, and intuitiveness. William Shakespeare regarded men and women quite differently. Marilyn French is the author of The Women’s Room, In the Name of Friendship, and From Eve to Dawn, a four volume series of women’s history throughout the world. In the midst of joining and fleeing a commune, growing organic vegetables, and operating a sustainable restaurant, Jess grapples with the legacy of her mother’s generation. With more options than her mother’s generation, but no role model for creating the life she desires, Jess experiments with sex and psychedelic drugs as she searches for happiness on her own terms. Jess Leighton, the daughter of a temperamental painter and a proto feminist Harvard professor, is struggling to make sense of her world amid racial tensions, Vietnam War protests, and anti government rage. The Grateful Dead is playing on the radio and teenagers are wearing long hair and blue jeans. It is the late 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Now, in her last novel, she has captured the complexities of life for the daughters of The Women’s Room generation in her highly anticipated new novel The Love Children. ‘ The Love Children is valuable in its exploration and depiction of the many ways in which gender can still be a limitation, even within a supposedly more enlightened society.’ Bust Magazine Marilyn French’s 1977 novel The Women’s Room epitomized the feminist movement and became one of the most influential books of our time.

Beyond Power by Marilyn French