Sex and subterfuge: Women novelists to 1850

by Eva Figes

Book by Figes, Eva

Genres: Nonfiction

178 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1988

About the author

Eva Figes (born Eva Unger) is a German-born English author.

Figes has written novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. She arrived in Britain in 1939 with her parents and a younger brother. Figes is now a resident of north London and the mother of the academic Orlando Figes and writer Kate Figes.

In the 1960s she was associated with an informal group of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall, which included Stefan Themerson, Ann Quin and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.

Figes's fiction has certain similarities with the writings of Virginia Woolf. The 1983 novel, Light, is an impressionistic portrait of a single day in the life of Claude Monet from sunrise to sunset.

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Minor frustrations with the style (“Contemporary readers who were shocked by the book were rightly shocked”), abrupt conclusion, and armchair conjecture ( “It [Mary Shelley’s later work] suggests that [Percy] Shelley’s encouragement was crucial to the production of that work [ Frankenstein ], and that without his guidance she lost all real sense of literary purpose”) counterbalancing insights on influential female authors in England during the 18th and mid-19th centuries who transformed the novel from an often lugubrious and polemical form into one capable of empowering thoughtful social discussion and individual reflection despite the constraints of their times

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting.