Tehanu

Ursula Le Guin has long been one of my favorite authors. The Dispossessed is quite possibly my favorite science fiction novel. However, I have never been satisfied with how she wrote women. I recall being troubled by her treatment of the female characters in some books, such as The Lathe of Heaven, and puzzled by the almost complete absence of female characters in others.

In Tehanu I am finally satisfied. This is a book about women, and they are fully developed characters who are not filtered through the lens of Le Guin’s concept of the male gaze. And what excellent, complex characters they are. A very fine book.

For me this is the most interesting of the Earthsea books so far. There’s a deep exploration of the roles of both women and men; it’s sometimes frustrating to read, and maybe if it were written today some things would be expressed differently, but I think it’s pretty much perfect as it is. I very much enjoyed it; it felt like a reward for patiently reading the earlier books with more traditional gender roles.

Le Guin writes beautiful descriptive prose, of both people and places. The oft-quoted speeches (e.g. from Moss) in this book were not so memorable in isolation for me as for some other readers; rather, it is the totality of the book that I loved.