Oh my god, I too would commit murder to read The Collected Letters of Le Guin and Russ! I was just talking with Nyctanthes about collections of literary letters, and I would add these to my personal pantheon in a heartbeat. I bet there would be such a mix of the truly profound and the truly egregious, not to mention the musings on craft and the doings of the day…
And you're so right about UKLG! The Dispossessed/TLHOD double bill always strikes me in this way: The Dispossessed is such a mess on this point (I will really never forgive it for the handling of the sexual assault Shevet commits), and then TLHOD has this very nuanced argument about how sexism poisons Genly's mission on Gethen -- but of course, there aren't any women qua women around. And then you get to her later career, just as you say, and it's worlds apart. I feel that reading the Earthsea series is like fast-forwarding through this development of hers, from Wizard, which contains moments of really egregious sexism, to Tehanu, which reads to me like someone who has just fully grasped the full horrible weight of patriarchy and is enraged, through The Other Wind, which has its blind spots (the veil…) and paints an interesting picture of a particular segment of American feminism in the 2000s.
no subject
And you're so right about UKLG! The Dispossessed/TLHOD double bill always strikes me in this way: The Dispossessed is such a mess on this point (I will really never forgive it for the handling of the sexual assault Shevet commits), and then TLHOD has this very nuanced argument about how sexism poisons Genly's mission on Gethen -- but of course, there aren't any women qua women around. And then you get to her later career, just as you say, and it's worlds apart. I feel that reading the Earthsea series is like fast-forwarding through this development of hers, from Wizard, which contains moments of really egregious sexism, to Tehanu, which reads to me like someone who has just fully grasped the full horrible weight of patriarchy and is enraged, through The Other Wind, which has its blind spots (the veil…) and paints an interesting picture of a particular segment of American feminism in the 2000s.