Women Writing About Men

by Jane Miller

Examines the way women novelists, such as Austen, Bronte, Eliot, Woolf, West, Lessing, and Walker, portray men as brothers, fathers, sons, gentlemen, and bullies

311 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This is Jane^Miller.

Reviews

[Marsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an instruction manual for women writers making male characters in their works more believable. It’s more a treatise about how various female writers have written about men in the past and the sources—social, political, emotional—that have influenced them in doing so. It is a thoughtful book, but it is not one that necessarily offers solutions so much as an alternative viewpoint of how differently women have viewed men and their shifting, various roles in their lives. (When Ms. Miller writes about Alice Walker’s longings for positive male role models in her father and brother, I felt an undeniable pang of understanding.)

Worthwhile reading for its sober insight, Women Writing about Men shows how through literature we can see just how the roles of men and women have changed throughout the years. Bringing us closer in understanding one another if not in our relations, this book shows just how both sexes perhaps yearn for the same things.