I have just re-red three early Margaret Atwood novels, triggered by a chance discovery in a charity shop of a green spine Virago Lady Oracle. They fit my theme of transforming/multiple women. In this novel Joan/Lady Orace/Louise K Delacourt was a fat adolescent – invisible. In adulthood she creates, under different identities – formulaic historical romances and acclaimed enigmatic poetry. She struggles to conceal her multiplicity and creativity from her absurdly rigid husband and fakes her own death – reborn as yet another, severed self. In the ending of Louise Delacourt’s final romantic novel it is the anti-heroine (the already wife/sexually used and rapacious) whose subjectivity is cent
I am reading a novel about a woman who abandons her family and home for a life of solitude and self sufficiency in the country - Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot. Abra lives in a home without clocks or mirrors which she decorates in a happily bodged way and gradually moves into an instinctual life, in tune with the seasons and without words. She cultivates enough land to feed herself but strives for no mastery beyond survival. Echoes of Robinson Crusoe. The yearning to escape - to be silent and alone is always with me too. How does that relate to being an artist and showing as well as making work? I come back - perennial word bead - to a quote from D W Winnicott: "It is a joy to be hidden b
