A Collection of Susan's Writings
Selected Essays
Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen
MFS 52.1 (2006) 187-197
Prior to my work on Bowen, her fiction had been written off as “ungainly,” “excessive,” not always “well-mannered.” Decode that and what we see is that Bowen’s work was dismissed for not being adequately “ladylike,” “feminine,” even “hysterical.” I couldn’t resist looking into the ways that gendered criticism kept her from critical respect. This article was one of many results of that feminist-focused reexamination. Read it here.
Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives
an introduction
The more I looked into Bowen’s critical reputation, the more gendered vocabulary I found. There were complaints about her “pointless verbal excess” (translation: she talked too much), her “neurotic” style (there was something wrong with her brain), her “highly wrought” style (her prose did not mind its manners). Of course, the question here was by whose standards was she being judged? As before, I couldn’t resist exploring how Bowen’s work threatens to blow the lid off the conventional (i.e., gender-blind) critical categories used to evaluate her work. Read it here.
How to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees: the strange relation of style and meaning in The Last September
Bowen’s novels had been considered so irregular, even at times a bit sordid, that many chose just not to read or consider her work. In this article, I examine the way the “unacceptable…tics” and “mannerisms” in Bowen’s prose threaten to undermine the conventional (i.e., often masculinist) categories interpretation historically used in Western criticism. Read it here.
Introduction Elizabeth Bowen: New Directions for Critical Thinking
MFS Modern Fiction Studies 53:2
In this article, I address critics’ struggle to fully engage with the provocative, unruly, impudent instabilities in Bowen’s work that don’t fit many Western, typically masculinist, ideologies, including traditional ideas about gender and heteronormativity. Read it here.
Giving Stoker His Due: Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
Irish Literary
For a long time, Stoker was considered the black sheep of the literary family, the cousin you didn’t want to invite over for Thanksgiving. But I wanted to explore the deviant aspects of his writing that challenge the limiting binaries that we use in Western culture: female/male, inside/outside/ self/other in the hope of exposing the repressive power of those categories. Read it here.
Thomas Hardy
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
XX
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
XX
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
XX
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
XX
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
XX
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
Editor
Developmental editor for The American Women’s Medical Association’s Women’s Complete Healthbook
For centuries, the symptoms of heart disease in women were misread or dismissed as signs of neurosis. That began to change in the 1980s, driven in part by the momentum of second-wave feminism and the efforts of women physicians in the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA). When I was invited to serve as a developmental editor for AMWA’s first comprehensive guide to women’s health, I jumped at the opportunity to contribute to that long-overdue shift in perspective.
Fiction
Lie About
Short story, Exquisite Corpse
For a period of my life, I lived in a highly affluent, Ivy-League town where I was frequently struck by the casual indifference with which social inequities were met. What passed as refined civility often masked a deeper reluctance to confront the injustices upholding privilege. Given my interest in how conventional interpretive frameworks obscure and sustain epistemological injustices, I wrote this story in a quasi-Gothic style—the genre’s characteristic unsettling atmosphere allowed me to explore what lies beneath the surface of well-mannered denial. Read it here.
The Editor
Short story, Orchid
I wrote this story in an effort to represent some of the tacit gender tensions that often exist between partners in longstanding conventional heterosexual couples. Read it here.
The Secret
Short story, Kelsey Review
When the Kelsey Review invited me to submit an excerpt from my novel, Surviving the Wreck, I chose this edited passage because it highlights the powerful social and emotional inequities that lead to incestuous behavior.
Plays
XX
Short story, Kelsey Review
When the Kelsey Review invited me to submit an excerpt from my novel, Surviving the Wreck, I chose this edited passage because it highlights the powerful social and emotional inequities that lead to incestuous behavior.
XX
Short story, Kelsey Review
When the Kelsey Review invited me to submit an excerpt from my novel, Surviving the Wreck, I chose this edited passage because it highlights the powerful social and emotional inequities that lead to incestuous behavior.
Poems
XX
Short story, Kelsey Review
When the Kelsey Review invited me to submit an excerpt from my novel, Surviving the Wreck, I chose this edited passage because it highlights the powerful social and emotional inequities that lead to incestuous behavior.
XX
Short story, Kelsey Review
When the Kelsey Review invited me to submit an excerpt from my novel, Surviving the Wreck, I chose this edited passage because it highlights the powerful social and emotional inequities that lead to incestuous behavior.
Or, this alternate way to display content
A Collection of Susan's Writings
Selected Essays
Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen
MFS 52.1 (2006) 187-197
Prior to my work on Bowen, her fiction had been written off as “ungainly,” “excessive,” not always “well-mannered.” Decode that and what we see is that Bowen’s work was dismissed for not being adequately “ladylike,” “feminine,” even “hysterical.” I couldn’t resist looking into the ways that gendered criticism kept her from critical respect. This article was one of many results of that feminist-focused reexamination. Read it here.
Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives
an introduction
The more I looked into Bowen’s critical reputation, the more gendered vocabulary I found. There were complaints about her “pointless verbal excess” (translation: she talked too much), her “neurotic” style (there was something wrong with her brain), her “highly wrought” style (her prose did not mind its manners). Of course, the question here was by whose standards was she being judged? As before, I couldn’t resist exploring how Bowen’s work threatens to blow the lid off the conventional (i.e., gender-blind) critical categories used to evaluate her work. Read it here.
How to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees: the strange relation of style and meaning in The Last September
Bowen’s novels had been considered so irregular, even at times a bit sordid, that many chose just not to read or consider her work. In this article, I examine the way the “unacceptable…tics” and “mannerisms” in Bowen’s prose threaten to undermine the conventional (i.e., often masculinist) categories interpretation historically used in Western criticism. Read it here.
Introduction Elizabeth Bowen: New Directions for Critical Thinking
MFS Modern Fiction Studies 53:2
In this article, I address critics’ struggle to fully engage with the provocative, unruly, impudent instabilities in Bowen’s work that don’t fit many Western, typically masculinist, ideologies, including traditional ideas about gender and heteronormativity. Read it here.
Giving Stoker His Due: Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
Irish Literary
For a long time, Stoker was considered the black sheep of the literary family, the cousin you didn’t want to invite over for Thanksgiving. But I wanted to explore the deviant aspects of his writing that challenge the limiting binaries that we use in Western culture: female/male, inside/outside/ self/other in the hope of exposing the repressive power of those categories. Read it here.
Thomas Hardy
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
XX
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
XX
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
XX
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
XX
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
XX
Literature & History
Because of my longstanding interest in feminism, violence, and gender disruptions, I chose to review this book to see if the irregularities in Hardy’s life were acknowledged or explored in the biography. Read it here.
Editor
Developmental editor for The American Women’s Medical Association’s Women’s Complete Healthbook
For centuries, the symptoms of heart disease in women were misread or dismissed as signs of neurosis. That began to change in the 1980s, driven in part by the momentum of second-wave feminism and the efforts of women physicians in the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA). When I was invited to serve as a developmental editor for AMWA’s first comprehensive guide to women’s health, I jumped at the opportunity to contribute to that long-overdue shift in perspective.
Fiction
Lie About
Short story, Exquisite Corpse
For a period of my life, I lived in a highly affluent, Ivy-League town where I was frequently struck by the casual indifference with which social inequities were met. What passed as refined civility often masked a deeper reluctance to confront the injustices upholding privilege. Given my interest in how conventional interpretive frameworks obscure and sustain epistemological injustices, I wrote this story in a quasi-Gothic style—the genre’s characteristic unsettling atmosphere allowed me to explore what lies beneath the surface of well-mannered denial. Read it here.
The Editor
Short story, Orchid
I wrote this story in an effort to represent some of the tacit gender tensions that often exist between partners in longstanding conventional heterosexual couples. Read it here.
The Secret
Short story, Kelsey Review
When the Kelsey Review invited me to submit an excerpt from my novel, Surviving the Wreck, I chose this edited passage because it highlights the powerful social and emotional inequities that lead to incestuous behavior.
Plays
XX
Short story, Kelsey Review
When the Kelsey Review invited me to submit an excerpt from my novel, Surviving the Wreck, I chose this edited passage because it highlights the powerful social and emotional inequities that lead to incestuous behavior.
XX
Short story, Kelsey Review
When the Kelsey Review invited me to submit an excerpt from my novel, Surviving the Wreck, I chose this edited passage because it highlights the powerful social and emotional inequities that lead to incestuous behavior.
Poems
XX
Short story, Kelsey Review
When the Kelsey Review invited me to submit an excerpt from my novel, Surviving the Wreck, I chose this edited passage because it highlights the powerful social and emotional inequities that lead to incestuous behavior.
XX
Short story, Kelsey Review
When the Kelsey Review invited me to submit an excerpt from my novel, Surviving the Wreck, I chose this edited passage because it highlights the powerful social and emotional inequities that lead to incestuous behavior.