I'm just going to include one of my favorite passages, from her essay "Notes from the Front Line":

"Since it was, therefore, primarily through my sexual and emotional life that I was radicalized—that I first became truly aware of the difference between how I was and how I was supposed to be, or expected to be—I found myself, as I grew older, increasingly writing about sexuality and its manifestations in human practice. And I found most of my raw material in the lumber room of the Western European imagination. . . .

"The sense of limitless freedom that I, as a woman, sometimes feel is that of a new kind of being. Because I simply could not have existed, as I am, at any other preceding time or place. I am the pure product of an advanced, industrialized, post-imperialist country in decline. . . .

"There are one or two lies in the lumber room about the artist, about how terrific it is to be an artist, how you’ve got to suffer and how artists are wise and good people and a whole lot of crap like that. I’d like to say something about that, because writing—to cite one art—is only applied linguistics and Shelley was wrong, we’re not the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. Some women really do seem to think they will somehow feel better or be better if they get it down on paper. I don’t know. . . .

"To backtrack a bit about ‘applied linguistics.’ Yet this, of course, is why it is so enormously important for women to write fiction as women—it is part of the slow process of decolonialising our language and our basic habits of thought. I really do believe this. It has nothing at all to do with being a ‘legislator of mankind’ or anything like that; it is to do with the creation of a means of expression for an infinitely greater variety of experience than has been possible heretofore, to say things for which no language has previously existed. . . .

"It’s been amazingly difficult, trying to sort out how I feel that feminism has affected my work, because that is really saying how it has affected my life and I don’t really know that because I live my life, I don’t examine it. I also feel I’ve showed off a lot, and given mini-lectures on this and that, in a pompous and middle-aged way. Oh, hell. What I really like doing is writing fiction and trying to work things out that way." (39-43) ( )