I’ve been asked to post about the Feminist Open Forum, but given the parameters of this blog, I’m going to have to crowbar some arts into the subject. Not too difficult, actually, given the amount of themes, writers and feminist literary theory to draw from.

But given that this is a blog and not a thesis, I’m just going to point up some of my favourite feminist writers, or writers who, when read within a feminist analysis, are part of what brought me to the Feminist Open Forum last Thursday.

 Much credit goes to Jean Rhys for Wide Sargasso Sea – a reworking of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the mad woman in the attic, this reclaims Bertha’s subjectivity in a clever shift of centre to the colonies. In other moments Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue, and even, I’ll admit it, Naomi Woolf’s The Beauty Myth, said things I needed to hear. I should point out, before y’all decry my more populist reading material, that I also put time in with Helene Cisoux, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, as well as Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. Yet it was in the poems of Anne Sexton, Dorothy Parker and Edna St Vincent Millay that I found voices that I recognised and to which I have never tired listening. So who have I missed?