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Ursula K Le Guin film reveals her struggle to write women into fantasy

New documentary shows author confiding that she once struggled to picture ‘a woman wizard’ and that ‘the Earthsea books as feminist literature are a total complete bust’

A new documentary about Ursula K Le Guin shows the late author reflecting on the impact of feminism on her work, revealing that she had been “a woman pretending to think like a man” and that her much-loved Earthsea books “are a total complete bust” as feminist literature.

Le Guin’s first three books about Earthsea centre on the male wizard Ged, with women “either marginal or essentially dependent on men”, according to the author herself. In director Arwen Curry’s forthcoming Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, which Curry worked on with Le Guin for 10 years, the novelist speaks of how when she started writing, “men were at the centre” of fantasy and admits that “from my own cultural upbringing, I couldn’t go down deep and come up with a woman wizard”.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2J3IW7O

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