Marilyn French

"Marilyn French's seven million copy bestseller The Women's Room crystallized the issues that ignited the women's movement. Now the acclaimed author updates that classic with a new exploration of the truths and realities behind women's lives. In the Name of Friendship dares to investigate how the women's movement changed the lives of those it touched and what hurdles it left to cross. Set in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, this wise novel is a group portrait of four disparate women who forge life-altering friendships despite personalities that vary as greatly as their vocations and ages. The novel weaves together a series of family crises with the friendships that help the four women refashion their lives. Maddy, the seventy-six-year-old real estate agent and matriarch of the group, struggles with the gradual death of her angry and rebellious Vietnam-marked son; fifty-year-old Alicia fights to reconnect her gay son with her newly retired husband; seventy-year-old musician Emily strives to bridge the gap with her estranged niece right at the moment her composition career starts to finally bloom; and Jenny, the thirty-year-old painter and baby of the group, questions the life she has created with her successful painter husband and tries to decide if she wants more from life. With this unusual group of multi-generational ladies, French tells a truly rare tale about four women who accidentally come into each other's lives and in the process form an enduring friendship. It is a story of supporting one another, of looking at the grim conflicts created by cultural expectations of women, and realizing you are not alone--truly a tale of continuing hope."--Publisher's website. Set in the mountains of the Berkshires, this novel revolves around four disparate women whose personalities vary as greatly as their ages but who manage to develop a profound, life-altering friendship.

Origins is the first of four volumes of a momental, readable, and unprecedented history of women throughout the world. The internationally celebrated author of The Women's Room, Marilyn French, spent over fifteen years with a team of researchers and prominent historians examining women's lives and activities in civilizations and societies spanning the ages.

Romantic love and its power to shake a woman's life at any age is the subject of this new novel by Marilyn French. At the center, Hermione Beldame, in her sixties, a writer of romance novels (eighty-seven of them, an average of two a year for forty years). She is rich, sophisticated, self-made, often di-vorced, long widowed, and long finished with the notion of romantic love as a part of her life. Until, one day, at a party - she sees across the room an attractive man who finds his way to her. What begins as a charming conversation between two strangers develops into much more (and much less) as the novel charts the course of a brief encounter that disrupts the equilibrium - the hard-won serenity - of its heroine, seizing her heart and her life during her summer with George.

Attempts to prove that there is a global war against women, with statistics that show the enormous economic disparity between men and women as well as devastating figures about the continuous physical assaults on women's bodies.

Relates a woman's experiences and changing attitudes from her marriage in the 1950's to her increasing independence in the 1970's.

Marilyn French takes us into the private hell that became her life when, in 1992, after a series of false diagnoses, it was determined that she had esophageal cancer - from the grueling regimen of radiation and chemotherapy to the subsequent coma from which it was thought she had no chance of recovering, to the even more serious post-coma illnesses, to her miraculous return to life. With the insight, intelligence, and emotional honesty with which she has examined so many other women's lives in her fiction, Marilyn French now considers her own, as she battles with doctors and the medical establishment; as her family and friends surround her, giving her mysterious strength; and as she defies all diagnoses and prognostications and emerges whole and more than ever open to life. While this book is a consideration of what it feels like to be dying, and as such it is a musing on death, it is also centered on life: death has cast a mark on life which gives us a new vision of meaning and purpose. As French examines death's role in her life, she shares a sense of what pain and suffering can mean to a person who utterly denies transcendent thought, of how an experience of closeness to death affects the life we are living now.

A narrative about the lives of four generations of women, about the sacrifices motherhood requires of women, and how they pass that cost on to the next generation.

4 halfsisters meet at the sickbed of their domineering and mostly absent father. The 4 women of different generation, background, religion and sexual orientation seem to have nothing more in common than the genes of Stephen Upton. During their stay, however they find out they may need sisterhood more than they would ever thought possible. Elizabeth, the oldest, is succesfull in her career, but one can't say the same thing for her personal life. She remains unmarried, and has only ever been in love with a man out of her reach. Mary, the second daughter, accomplished quite the opposite. She has married multiple times in search for... For what actually? but has only found love in the arms of her last husband, who was killed in an accident. Alex is the 3rd daughter, married with children, she is easily mistaken for a naiv housewife, but there is more to her than one might think. And then there is the young Ronnie, the daughter of the chicana housekeeper who has the upton blue eyes. As time passes the sisters find out they have more in common than a father, or even the horrible secret he has laid upon every one of them...

This examination of the nature and effects of power draws on the wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, political science, law, and theology to investigate the sources of patriarchy.

William Shakespeare regarded men and women quite differently. In his early plays, the so-called masculine qualities of prowess, bravery, and individualism were accorded more respect than "feminine" attributes of mercy, compassion, and intuitiveness. Yet, in his later plays, there is evidence of a reversal in Shakespeare's attitudes, a new fear of the power of the masculine principle and new admiration for the feminine. Marilyn French offers a feminist perspective on each of Shakespeare's plays. More than a brilliantly original literary interpretation, this fascinating volume provides penetrating insight into attitudes toward men, women, love, and power in Western culture. - Publisher.