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.

Women have since steadily appeared more in English literature courses, including Virginia Woolf, the Brontës, Toni Morrison, Kate Chopin, Emily Dickenson, and others; however, full equality in high school or college curricula has yet to be achieved. According to statistics from OpenSyllabus, five out of 20 most-studied authors in university English literature courses are men; only three women make the top 10 (“A Startling Lack Of Female Author Representation…” Girl Talk HQ, 9 November 2023.). Meanwhile, as of 2023 in the UK, only 2% of high-school students study women writers for their final standardized tests (Hall, Rachel. “Books by female authors studied by just 2%…” The Guardian, 2 March 2023.). Courses also widely favor white writers, male and female, further narrowing the experiences and ideas encountered by teens and new adults.

The novel dramatizes this academic conflict through its characters. The male honors students—Sam, Yash, and Ivan—represent the old guard, using their mastery of canonical figures like James Joyce and Marcel Proust as a form of intellectual and social power. Sam and Ivan dismiss the narrator’s creative writing pursuits, and the narrator’s journey to becoming a writer mirrors the changing academic landscape.

Her turning point comes under the mentorship of Dr. Felske, a female professor who introduces her to a new canon: “She feeds me Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Bowen, Djuna Barnes, Nadine Gordimer, and Jamaica Kincaid” (94). There is a diversity of both gender and race in her new reading list, and a teacher assigning them rather than the narrator finding them herself demonstrates how crucial the active role of an authority figure is in alleviating hierarchies in academia. This education empowers the narrator to find an authentic voice, illustrating how the broadening of the literary canon created new possibilities for female authorship, and she becomes the only character of the group to create a successful literary career.

Specifically, Heart the Lover engages with the misogyny in universities as not only an artistic or academic barrier, but a contributor to the perpetuation of broader prejudice. For example, a subplot in the novel includes the rape and murder of a young, female Iranian student, whose death is swept under the rug by the university. The narrator’s first boyfriend, who is white, sexist, and reveres only male authors, never mentions this; meanwhile, her second boyfriend attended the girl’s funeral and treats it with great importance. This aligns with his marginalized identity as a person of color on campus and his more accepting, nuanced perspective on writing and on gender dynamics. While he is still susceptible to moments of internalized sexism, he adamantly treats the narrator with respect and remains open to new ideas about writing, specifically those influenced by her gender.