Marilyn French

Marilyn French (21 November 1929 – 2 May 2009) was an American novelist, literary critic, and feminist intellectual whose novel The Women’s Room (1977) sold over twenty million copies worldwide and became one of the most important and polarising books of the feminist movement — a novel that articulated, with furious precision, the rage and suffocation experienced by a generation of American women trapped in suburban domesticity.

Early Life and Academic Career

French was born in New York City to working-class parents of Polish descent. She attended Hofstra University, married young, had two children, and spent the 1950s and early 1960s in exactly the kind of suburban marriage that would become the subject of her fiction — a marriage she later described as stifling and miserable.

She returned to graduate school, earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1972 with a dissertation on James Joyce, and published her academic study The Book as World: James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1976) — a serious work of literary criticism that demonstrated her intellectual range. But it was her first novel, written during and about the experience of her divorce and her political awakening, that made her famous.

The Women’s Room (1977)

The novel follows Mira Ward from her 1950s marriage through divorce, a return to graduate school at Harvard, and a growing feminist consciousness, set against the backdrop of the broader women’s movement. Around Mira, French assembles a chorus of women — each trapped, each damaged, each finding her way toward independence or being destroyed in the attempt — who collectively represent the range of female experience in postwar America.

The Women’s Room is not a subtle novel. French acknowledged that she wanted to make readers angry, and the book’s power comes from its willingness to catalogue — at length, in detail, without mitigation — the humiliations, the violence, the economic dependency, the sexual coercion, and the psychological diminishment that constituted ordinary female experience in mid-century America. The famous sentence “All men are rapists, and that’s all they are” (spoken by a character, not endorsed by the narrator, though the distinction was lost on many critics) became one of the most quoted and misquoted lines in modern American literature.

The novel was an enormous commercial success — eventually translated into twenty languages — and was passionately embraced by millions of women who recognised their own experience in its pages. It was equally passionately attacked by critics who found it didactic, humourless, and unfair to men. Both reactions were, in their way, correct: The Women’s Room is a polemical novel, and its power and its limitations derive from the same source — its refusal to be balanced, diplomatic, or kind.

Subsequent Novels

French continued to write fiction throughout her career, though nothing matched the commercial or cultural impact of The Women’s Room. The Bleeding Heart (1980) explored a love affair between a feminist academic and a conventionally masculine businessman — an attempt to imagine what an equal heterosexual relationship might look like. Her Mother’s Daughter (1987) traced four generations of mothers and daughters. Our Father (1994) gathered four half-sisters at the deathbed of their patriarch father. In the Name of Friendship (2006) depicted the lives of four older women in a New England town.

These novels extended French’s central concerns — the structures of patriarchy, the possibilities and failures of female solidarity, the difficulty of heterosexual love under conditions of inequality — but none had the raw, angry energy of the first book.

Feminist Theory and Nonfiction

French’s nonfiction is arguably more intellectually ambitious than her fiction. Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals (1985) is a vast, sweeping argument that patriarchy is the fundamental organising principle of human civilisation and that the domination of nature and the domination of women are aspects of the same impulse. The War Against Women (1992) documented violence against women worldwide.

Her most ambitious project was From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World (2002–2008), a four-volume history that attempted nothing less than a comprehensive account of women’s experience from prehistory to the present. The work is massive, idiosyncratic, and uneven, but its ambition is extraordinary.

Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (1981) applied feminist theory to Shakespeare’s plays, arguing that the plays are organised around a division between the “masculine” principle (power, control, war) and the “feminine” principle (nature, nurturance, community).

A Season in Hell (1998)

French’s memoir of her battle with oesophageal cancer — A Season in Hell (1998) — is perhaps her most underrated book: a raw, unsentimental account of illness, medical treatment, and the experience of confronting death, written with the same refusal to soften experience that characterised her fiction.

Legacy

French’s reputation has fluctuated with the broader cultural standing of second-wave feminism. During the 1980s and 1990s, she was often dismissed as strident or reductive. More recently, as the concerns of second-wave feminism have been reassessed in light of the #MeToo movement and ongoing debates about structural inequality, her work has attracted renewed interest.

Collecting French

The Women’s Room (1977, Summit Books) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary collectible — a book that was printed in enormous quantities after its initial success but whose true first printing is identifiable and sought. Fine first-printing copies bring $50–$200. French’s nonfiction first editions are less collected but of scholarly interest.