![]() ![]() There were, in short, no women writers creating women characters who spoke their minds we had no parallels to Jane Austen's Elizabeth no American women were telling their readers what it is/was like to grow up in this vast and complex culture. But there were no women counterparts to Huck Finn there were no women Gatsbys or Holden Caulfields, or Christopher Newmans. Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers gave us memorable figures, but who were they in relation to their authors? Perhaps the most personal, intimate insights to come from an American woman author had come from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and from Kate Chopin in her novel The Awakening, a piece relegated to obscurity until recently. Cather gave us Ántonia, but this heroine seemed to be an idealized romantic "other" of Cather herself. We had Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Faulkner's and Sherwood Anderson's young girls and women Hemingway left us the unforgettable Bret Ashley, but none of these characters came from the pens of women. Until the 1970s, American literature did not have a great many female heroines in its works of fiction, and too few of them had been created by women authors. ![]()
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