Title: Something to love: heroines and their heroes
Abstract:Women writers have often tried to answer that petulant question 'What do women want?' by using the freedom of fiction to explore how a woman awakens to love and how that love first fastens on one pers...Women writers have often tried to answer that petulant question 'What do women want?' by using the freedom of fiction to explore how a woman awakens to love and how that love first fastens on one person rather than another. In the two decades following the Second World War, women novelists continued to portray their heroines falling in love, with the happy or unhappy consequences of that love. Their disquiet about men as lovers — and potential husbands — runs counter to the ideas of the period, which emphasised the desirability of attracting men and turning them into husbands. Love and marriage went together, as the words of a contemporary song said, 'like a horse and carriage'. The same song ended by stating categorically, 'You can't have one without the other'. Postwar women writers appear to have disagreed: love is one thing, they suggest, marriage another.KeywordsMale CharacterRailway BridgeWoman WriterWoman CharacterMale HeroThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Read More
Publication Year: 1989
Publication Date: 1989-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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