entirely ruined her disposition with books

It's Yuletide reveals already! I got to write for Le Guin's Five/Four Ways to Forgiveness when it was fresh in my mind and created a missing scene for it to flesh out two scenes from canon--one of the most disturbing ones, and one of the most hopeful ones. Combining them was a fruitful challenge.

four names for freedom (2908 words) by Lirazel
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Four Ways to Forgiveness - Ursula K. Le Guin, Five Ways to Forgiveness - Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Cycle - Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding, Canon-Typical Violence, allusions to canon-typical sexual violence, Missing Scene
Summary:

A chain of watchwords for women on the path to freedom.

This weekend I read City of Illusions, one of Ursula K Le Guin's early Hainish novels.

Here's my review:

This is the strongest of the 3 early Hainish books but goodness gracious, young Le Guin couldn’t write a woman to save her life, could she?

That’s horrifying for what it says about the culture she grew up in but heartening because it reminds us that we can grow: this is the same woman who, decades later, was able to write Tehanu. May we all be so lucky as to become better versions of ourselves.

And I was just thinking about female writers who are extremely good writers, but could not or did not write women with any real agency or interiority.

Obviously this made me think of Rosemary Sutcliff, and how deeply and tenderly she explores male characters and their relationships to each other...and how women are only ever ciphers in her work.

I've never been able to decide which explanation is worse: that she was incapable of believing that women (besides her) had any real depth or whether she thought they could, but she was just completely uninterested in it.

The difference between Le Guin and Sutcliff is that Le Guin grew. She saw where she was weak or had failed and she worked hard to become better. I admire that tremendously.

(Btw, I've heard she and Joanna Russ were correspondents, which makes so much sense, and I would commit murder to be able to read the letters between them.)

What's striking about Le Guin's internalized misogyny is that she was so smart and also she lived in the 20th century. Female writers of the past had written wonderful and nuanced female characters, so it was clearly possible. Le Guin's mother was an interesting, thoughtful, intelligent woman with a talent for writing. So why did Le Guin have such a hard time discovering(?) that it was possible to write interesting female characters? I speculate that it had something to do with the world of anthropology that she grew up in because of her father, but there were significant female anthropologists during Le Guin's formative years and surely she came into contact with them? I just don't know.

I guess we all just have major blind spots and the question is whether we are open to having those pointed out to us and working to learn to see.