Marilyn French: THE AMERICAN writer and academic Marilyn French, who has died aged 79, is best known for her debut novel, The Women's Room. It was published in 1977, when she was almost 50, and captured the mood of the time, selling more than 20 million copies worldwide.
French went on to write more novels, including The Bleeding Heart(1980), and non-fiction works on patriarchy and women's history. But none of her later books enjoyed the success of The Women's Room.
The novel's best-known line - "All men are rapists, and that's all they are" - has not been an easy legacy for the next three decades of feminism. Spoken in anger by one of the book's most radical characters, a woman whose daughter has been gang-raped, it entered the popular lexicon and is often cited, wrongly, as one of the tenets of modern feminism.
French's own daughter had been raped and she was an angry writer, a fact she acknowledged in an interview two years ago, although she also insisted that she liked men. "I've always said I like men very much," she once said.
The novel has other parallels with its author's life, telling the story of Mira Ward, a woman who marries young in the 1950s and goes back to college after her marriage breaks up. At Harvard, Ward discovers friendship and feminism, illustrating the next chapter in the lives of the educated American women whose disappointments had been chronicled more than a decade earlier by French's contemporary Betty Friedan.
French described in fiction the frustrations Friedan identified in The Feminine Mystique(1963), and showed how the aspirations of a generation of reluctant housewives were transformed by feminism. The novel spoke not just to French's contemporaries but also their daughters, who passed it around with the same enthusiasm they had shown four years earlier for Erica Jong's upbeat feminist novel, Fear of Flying.
French was born Marilyn Edwards in New York, the daughter of third-generation Polish immigrants. Her father, Charles Edwards, was an engineer and her mother, Isabel, worked in a department store, but what Marilyn remembered of her childhood was the grinding poverty of the Depression.
Her "unloving" mother scrimped to get her daughter an education, sending her to Hofstra College on Long Island where she studied English and philosophy and graduated in 1951. A year earlier she had married a lawyer, Robert French jnr, and the couple had two children, although the marriage was unhappy. "I saw my mother's life," she said. "I tried very hard to escape and I ended up in the same trap."
French's experience shaped the bitter view of marriage she expressed in The Women's Room, where Mira's husband eventually dumps her for his mistress. "My husband was a Jekyll and Hyde," she said. "Everyone else thought he was the nicest guy in the world but he was a monster at home."
French doggedly pursued her academic career. She got a master's degree in 1964 and taught English at Hofstra for four years - and escaped from the marriage in 1967. French went to Harvard, got her PhD in 1972 and published her first book in 1976 - a scholarly study of James Joyce's Ulysses. This was overshadowed a year later, however, by the international success of The Women's Room.
Almost overnight, French found herself one of the greats of contemporary American feminism, alongside Jong, Friedan and Mseditor Gloria Steinem, who became a friend. The fact that she came to public attention as a popular novelist may not have been entirely comfortable for a woman who regarded herself as a serious academic, but it expresses a tension at the heart of her work.
French's non-fiction polemics were rigorously researched; she published scholarly works such as Beyond Power: Women, Men and Morals(1985), a 600-page analysis of patriarchy, and the four-volume From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women(2002).
Yet the romanticism which she poured into novels such as The Bleeding Heartseeped into her non-fiction, expressing itself in lyrical passages about a primordial "matricentry". "We were bound to the goddess who was immanent in nature, in the vegetation and the moon, mistress of the animals, who fed us freely - most of the time," she wrote in Beyond Power.
Throughout her career, her primary subject was the subjugation of women. She could appear harsh, an impression belied by her warmth in interviews, and she earned a reputation as a misandrist, which she seems to have been too battle-scarred to challenge. "They said I was a man-hater, and I never defended myself against that, because I do believe that men are to blame for the condition of women," she said.
French was a heavy smoker and in 1992 she was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and not expected to live. She embarked on a gruelling course of treatment and survived against all the odds, a sequence of events she went on to describe without self-pity in A Season in Hell: A Memoir(1998).
Towards the end of her life, French was asked what feminism had achieved, sometimes by interviewers who assumed she was disappointed by the reluctance of younger women to adopt the label.
She refused to play along, insisting she admired young feminists who were working with women in Africa, India, South America and "the ghettoes here in the US".
There is no doubt she would have liked to see greater improvements in the status of women: "She had higher standards and higher hopes," Steinem told the New York Times.
But French expressed her amazement in 2007 at seeing a woman "daring to run for president" in her lifetime, and promised to vote for Hillary Clinton even though she regarded her as "conservative by my standards".
The Women's Roomis French's lasting achievement, a testimony to the energy and intellectual ferment of the decade in which it was written. Steinem summed up its impact: "It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy."
Her son, Robert, and daughter, Jamie, survive her.
Marilyn French: born November 21st, 1929; died May 2nd, 2009