Newswire
Posted on May 30, 2018 at 3:00 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
Author Ursula K. Le Guin struggled to write a female wizard, according to an upcoming documentary.
In Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, which will premiere on June 10 at a UK documentary festival, she tells filmmaker Arwen Curry that “from my own cultural upbringing, I couldn’t go down deep and come up with a woman wizard."
Le Guin also describes herself as "a woman pretending to think like a man," which she clearly unlearned by the time she published Tehanu.
Tehanu is the fourth book in her Earthsea series and the first in the saga to center on a female character.
Le Guin has a well-deserved legacy as a pioneer in fantasy and as a tenacious fighter for female representation in literature.
In fact, in 1987, she sent a blistering letter to a man who’d asked her to write a blurb for a sci-fi anthology that didn’t include a single woman.
Le Guin died on January 22, 2018, at the age of eighty-eight.
Categories: Today in Books