Saturday, August 25, 2012

Women Writing War

Recently, I've seen a number of blog posts, articles, and marketing blurbs focusing on women who are writing stories set in or directly putting their characters into war or battle sequences.  This is spanning from WWI and back to Alexander the Great, and if the attention I'm seeing indicates market viability (can't help but think it does) it certainly won't hurt me once I have revisions completed and begin querying again.  Take a look at this piece, which shows a nice breadth of examples.

Interestingly, some of these works are marketed not by their settings (martial conflict) but by their characters (women's stories) - but it looks like, more and more, that trick is trumped by the fact that some women are writing from the point of view, or centering on, male protagonists.  Alexander was Mary Renault's subject starting over thirty years ago, women's prominence in this type of historical fiction is gaining, and in fantasy women have been able to increase their presence for at least the past decade or so.

Hooray for women!  *Working away on those revisions*

When Ignorance was reviewed, Roberts noticed it was not described as a story about war, but a story about women. It is this critical misapprehension that Roberts suggests has led to the perception that women don't tackle war in their fiction.
"Jane Austen is often attacked for not being interested in the big issues but when I read her novels, I see she is writing about the battle of Waterloo, men coming home from war, and how middle-class women are dependent on these men."

1 comment:

K.E. Skedgell said...

Sooner or later I'll be getting to the section of my novel where my MC, a male, will be in the midst of a war. That'll take a lot of research since I'm not all too familiar with the workings of war. I'll most likely focus on what my character experiences during his time in war than all of the technicalities of it. Or something like that. Still, I need to know some of the workings, and in particular how the king for whom he fights for, choreographs his battles. And such.