Heart the Lover

Lily King’s Heart the Lover is set in the late 20th century, a period when the traditional Western literary canon came under scrutiny in American universities. For decades, the study of English literature centered on a body of work dominated by white male authors. However, beginning in the 1970s, feminist literary criticism began to challenge this standard. Influential scholarly works, such as Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), argued for the recovery and serious study of literature by women. This movement led to the expansion of university curricula to include a more diverse range of voices.

A large factor in the slow acceptance of women writers in university coursework was the delayed incorporation of female students themselves into college programs. The highly respected Oxford University, for example, only had its first female professor in 1949 and began admitting female students without limitations in 1957 (English Faculty Library. “Women’s History Month 2023: A Brief History of Women’s Writing.” The University of Oxford Libraries, 14 March 2023.). This pattern persisted globally, including in the US, and disparities in both the treatment of female students and the study of female writers still dogged university settings in the novel’s original time period, the 1980s.