American novelist, poet, memoirist, critic
Erica Jong (born 26 March 1942) is an American author and educator. Born in New York City, Jong graduated from Barnard College in 1963. She is best known for her first novel, Fear of Flying (published in 1973), which created a sensation with its frank treatment of a woman's sexual desires.
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Alternative Names:
Erica Mann Jong
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Erica Mann
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For women writers the systematic discouragement even to attempt to become writers has been so constant and pervasive a force that we cannot consider their literary productions without somehow assessing the effects of that barrage of discouragement. Often discouraged in the home, often at school, often by families and spouses, the rare woman writer who does not lose her determination along the way is already a survivor. That one should next have to face the systematic discouragement of a male-oriented literary establishment is absurd and sad but nonetheless a real fact of life for many women writers.* (No one has chronicled this repression better than Tillie Olsen in her splendid book Silences (1978).) The truth is that many of us are doomed to do our best work in an atmosphere of condescension and loneliness. Yet perhaps there is some sense in which that lack of establishment approval is a blessing, for an artist must learn (the sooner the better) that he or she works for the work itself, not for approval, and it is easier to establish that sense of creative independence when approval is lacking than when one is seduced by it.
Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness, anger that does not know its own name. And nothing is more freeing for a woman (or for a woman writer) than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One's Own, many women's books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but then the spirit must be nurtureed.
when I go to read my work at colleges, I find the students reading and discussing contemporary writing by women as if there never had been a time when a Distinguished Critic could say "Women can't be writers"-even in jest. I am grateful and glad for that change, but it has not been won without pain.