New Edition

Ooooh! Look what was just delivered to my place - a beautiful new edition of Elizabeth Macarthur. Just quietly, I think I like this cover better. I fear the previous one was in danger of being dismissed as 'a woman's book'.  That's not a joke.  I took my daughter into a bookshop recently, one of a large commercial chain.  In an effort to embarrass her even more than usual, I took her hunting for a copy of my book.  There it was on the Biography shelf.  Nice. Then we went [...]

2019-03-01T21:11:16+11:00March 1st, 2019|Elizabeth Macarthur|7 Comments

Sex and writing

You can probably have sex without writing but it seems (this week at least) that writing without sex* is impossible.The Daily Beast's Mark Dery explains in this article how Strunk and White's famously popular The Elements of Style is in fact a call to reject feminine, or flowery, prose.“No book is genuinely free from political bias,” George Orwell wrote, in his essay “Why I Write.” “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” The opinion that the canon laws of usage, composition, [...]

2018-03-21T14:55:36+11:00August 7th, 2015|Interesting Articles|0 Comments

The Wife Drought by Annabel Crabb

We've all seen the alarming stats about women in the workplace.  The higher the workplace position, the fewer women.  But why?  And what to do about it?  Annabel Crabb thinks she has the answer.  And I think she's right. I've read lots of feminist critiques of the workplace, and I've enjoyed most of them.  I've read lots of interviews with women in positions of influence and power.  I've often enjoyed those too. But there comes a time when it all begins to get repetitive. Women do most of the housework.  [...]

2018-03-21T14:55:42+11:00October 30th, 2014|Book Review|7 Comments

The Stella Count – Women and Book Reviews

Sad fact: The majority of book reviews in Australian publications are still of books by male writers. The Stella Prize, in conjunction with Books+Publishing, has just released the statistics for the 2013 Stella Count, tracking the relative number of reviews of books by women as compared with books by men in most of the major newspapers and literary journals.  This year, the Stella Count also indicates the genders of literary reviewers, and provides information on whether books by male or female writers are reviewed by male or female reviewers. Go [...]

2018-03-21T14:55:43+11:00September 24th, 2014|Interesting Articles|0 Comments

The Fictional Woman by Tara Moss

Tara Moss has released a memoir, The Fictional Woman.  She opens with some frightening facts: Women comprise 50.2 per cent of Australia's population but as of 2014 they make up less than one-third of all parliamentarians and occupy roughly 5 per cent of all Cabinet positions. About 70 per cent of front-page by-lines in Australian newspapers belong to male journalists, despite the fact that an equal number of men and women are employed as journalists. During six months of US election coverage in national print, tv broadcast and radio outlets, [...]

2018-03-21T14:56:18+11:00July 16th, 2014|Book Review|0 Comments

Men, stop lecturing women about reading romance novels

Try this terrific article at the Washington Post about why we deserve better than snide lectures. Another year, another man who is utterly horrified to discover just how many American women read romance novels. This time, the perplexed fellow in question is William Giraldi, a novelist and editor who has taken to the pages of the New Republic to tell us just how appalled he is by the popularity of the erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” and the more general financial success of the genre...Giraldi also tells us that [...]

2018-03-21T14:56:20+11:00June 18th, 2014|Interesting Articles|0 Comments
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